Author: Gianni Sarcone

On Art Again, Despite Everything

Gianni Sarcone

The word art, in the sense we give it today, has no exact equivalent in ancient Greek. The Greeks used téchnē (τέχνη), a term far broader than our word technique. It referred to the knowledge and skill required to make something well, with a clear purpose and a command of the means to achieve it.

The value of a work was also measured by its aretḗ: its excellence in fulfilling its purpose. The Greek word agathós, meaning “good,” could describe something or someone performing their role well: a soldier who showed courage in battle, or a craftsperson who gave a material the form best suited to its purpose.

In this way of thinking, beauty and goodness were not entirely separate. Quality was not an ornament added to usefulness; it was the fullest expression of a thing’s purpose.

In ancient Rome, ars referred to skills acquired through study, practice, and experience, while ingenium described natural gifts and innate talent. Art, then, was not merely a matter of inspiration. It also required knowledge, discipline, and mastery of one’s craft.

Even today, the words master and maestro, both derived from the Latin magister, reflect this older ideal of artistic excellence. They describe someone who has developed exceptional skill through knowledge, practice, and experience.

In the past, we tended to admire what an artist could do: their skill, their command of their craft, their technical mastery—or, at its worst, technique for technique’s sake. Today, what seems to matter more is the ability to surprise us: the unprecedented, the unexpected, the breaking of conventions. The source of wonder has shifted from mastery to novelty, from what an artist can accomplish to what no one has seen before.

Personally, I have no problem with that shift. Technique matters, but when it becomes an end in itself, it can get in the way of the very thing it should serve: the pleasure of experiencing a work of art on our own terms, without being told what to see or how to feel. After all, true mastery does not always mean showing off what you can do. Sometimes, it means knowing when to stop proving it.

And as a final thought, let’s be honest: these days, what often matters most is not what the artist can do, but whose name appears on the work. Believe me, an authenticated signature can carry more weight than the art itself. There’s even a Greek-derived word for it: autograph. Just my two cents.

Komorebi: The Beauty of Passing Moments

Gianni Sarcone

With age, I have developed a quiet awareness—a deliberate minimalism that allows me to step back from the current of life, much as an artist steps back from a canvas to see it whole. I am a solitary person by nature. I have little appetite for the frenzy of our times: the endless accumulation of possessions, the demands of social obligations, or the constant stream of noise competing for our attention. I prefer distance, silence, and the freedom to observe without being swept along.

There is a Japanese word that captures something of what I feel: komorebi (木漏れ日).

It describes sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees, scattering shifting patterns of light and shadow across the ground. Yet it also speaks to me of the fleeting beauty of things that cannot be held still. It stirs a quiet blend of serenity and melancholy, a feeling that passes through my senses and reaches the deepest part of my being, where I feel closest to my true self.

Komorebi brings to mind Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Both touch on light, shadow, and the limits of human perception. Yet while Plato urges us to look beyond appearances, I find myself lingering over them.

A breeze moves the branches, the light shifts, and the pattern changes. What appears in one moment will never be exactly the same again. Nothing needs to be captured, explained, or possessed. I only need to be there to witness it.

Beauty has less to do with permanence than with attention. A moment does not lose its value because it passes; its transience is part of what makes it matter.

We spend so much of our lives trying to hold on to people, places, feelings, and even former versions of ourselves that no longer exist. Yet life, like sunlight through the leaves, is always moving. What slips away may never return, but we have known it, if only for a moment.

To notice komorebi is to pause and recognize that impermanence is not the enemy of beauty. It is inseparable from it.

The light filters through. The leaves move. For a fleeting moment, the world is simply as it is.

That is enough.

Ceci n’est pas une perspective

Gianni Sarcone

An impossible orange structure embedded in a surreal, Magritte-like painting.

This image is part of a book project exploring visual illusions through paintings inspired by the styles of well-known artists. The idea is to revisit familiar artistic languages—Magritte, Picasso, and others—through invented works that play with visual illusions, perspective, and perceptual paradoxes.

I’m developing this as a richly illustrated book for a broad audience interested in art, perception, and visual thinking.

I’d be interested in hearing from publishers or art-book editors who might like to explore the project.

Interference Photography: When Color Is No Longer a Dye, but a Structure

Gianni Sarcone

In 1891, French physicist Gabriel Lippmann invented interference photography, a process that could capture color without using dyes or pigments. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1908 for this work.

The principle is simple but remarkable. Light passes through an extremely fine-grained photosensitive emulsion and is reflected by a layer of mercury behind it. The incoming and reflected waves interfere, producing standing waves whose structure varies with the wavelengths of light. This microscopic interference pattern is recorded in the emulsion.

An interference photograph of a bouquet of flowers from the Lippmann Collection, preserved at Sorbonne University.

When the plate is later illuminated, its microscopic structure diffracts and reflects selected wavelengths, reproducing the colors of the original scene. Unlike conventional three-color photography, which reconstructs color from three components, Lippmann’s process stores the color information as a physical structure of interference.

The process, however, was technically demanding and never became practical for widespread photography. In 1907, the Lumière brothers introduced the Autochrome, which became the first widely successful commercial color photography process based on three-color principles.

Lippmann photography had one important advantage, though: because it used no dyes, its colors were not subject to fading caused by the deterioration of colorants over time.

And the old idea has found a new life. Researchers have adapted the principle of Lippmann’s standing waves for long-term archival data storage. In 2019, experimental storage plates were exposed to cosmic radiation aboard the International Space Station for nine months, with no detectable degradation of the stored data.

From recording color to preserving information in space, the same principle still has something to say: sometimes the most durable way to store information is to make it part of the structure itself.

☞ Further reading.

Sarcone: The Willow

Gianni Sarcone

My surname Sarcone, attested as early as circa 1150, may reflect a phytotoponym derived from the Latin salix, salĭcis, “willow,” with the collective or augmentative suffix -ōne. A possible evolution is salicōne → salicone → sar(i)cone, through the phonetic changes that shaped the name over time.

I like to think that my name is connected to nature, and especially to this magnificent tree: the willow. The willow has always fascinated me for its resilience, flexibility, and capacity for renewal. It bends without breaking, withstands the wind, and grows back vigorously after being cut. Its strength comes from its flexibility.

That symbolism speaks to me. Life constantly changes, and resisting every change is not necessarily a sign of strength. Sometimes you have to bend, adapt, and keep going without losing your roots.

The willow is also traditionally associated with the cycles of the Moon, imagination, dreams, intuition, and flexibility of mind. I find these associations particularly fitting, since much of my work concerns perception, imagination, and the strange ways in which the mind constructs what we call reality.

My name also has an ancient Indo-European root. Salix is related to the Indo-European root *səlik, with cognates such as Greek helíkē and related forms in Celtic and Germanic languages.

I like the idea that a surname can carry such a long memory. A few letters inherited from the past can still evoke a tree, its roots, its branches, its movement in the wind—and, in some small way, the person who carries its name.

Sarcone: the willow. Rooted, flexible, resilient, and always capable of growing again.

Kinegrams: Optical Animations from Static Images

Gianni Sarcone

Two monks stood outside a temple, watching its flag wave in the wind.
“The flag moves,” said one.
“No, the wind moves,” said the other.A third monk smiled:
“Neither moves. Your mind moves.”

Back in the early 2000s, I ran a few public art workshops exploring a deceptively simple idea: a printed image does not have to move to appear animated.

The trick is a kinegram—a static image transformed into a precise pattern of lines. Place a special acetate screen over it, and the hidden movement suddenly appears.

No electronics. No screen. No animation software. Just a carefully calculated pattern and a bit of moiré.

In these workshops, we experimented with:
• concentric circles
• simple radial patterns
• geometric textures

The resulting kinegrams produce seamless, looping animations from completely static printed images. If you’re interested in exploring the technique or collaborating, feel free to contact me.

☞ More on kinegrams.

Horse in the Snow

Gianni Sarcone

Is the horse walking toward you or away from you?

Video: Alesia Willard (@rudniktheroan), British Columbia, Canada, 2024.


This is a case of “bistable perception“: the image contains ambiguous visual cues that allow the brain to construct two different interpretations.

The dark silhouette against the bright snow removes important depth cues—surface detail, shadows, and clear body contours. Occlusion between the legs also makes their spatial position difficult to determine. The brain therefore fills in missing information through “top-down processing“, drawing on expectations and prior visual experience.

The horse is actually walking away from the camera. The fascinating part is that the same ambiguous image can make your brain perceive two completely different directions.

Exploring Tessellations & Op Art: Hidden Arrows

Gianni Sarcone

This brief tutorial explores an Op Art tessellation that plays with bistable perception, figure–ground reversal and negative space. By combining modular geometric tiles with contrasting colors, the pattern creates a visual interplay in which arrows can be perceived as either foreground shapes or background forms, depending on how the pattern is interpreted.

Experiment 1:

· Preparation — Fig. A: Start with a 3 × 3 square. Divide it along its diagonals into four triangles, then add a 1 × 1 square to the outer side of each triangle, as shown. Color the resulting cross-shaped tile with two contrasting colors, ensuring that adjacent sections are different colors. The construction produces four inward-pointing arrows.

· Preparation — Fig. B: Following the construction shown, subdivide a 2 × 2 square to create five diamonds arranged in a staggered pattern. Use the same two contrasting colors. This produces a complementary tile containing four outward-pointing arrows.

· Assembly — Fig. C: The two tiles are complementary and fit together. Interlock the cross-shaped tiles with inward-pointing arrows and the square tiles containing the diamond pattern to create a continuous tessellation.

Visual result: The alternating geometric modules form a large geometric Op Art pattern in which arrows emerge through figure–ground reversal. And hidden within it are, believe it or not, 100 arrows. Yes, one hundred arrows!

This op art work is available as fine art prints and canvases from my online official gallery.

Experiment 2:

· Preparation — Fig. D: Build a four-armed pinwheel shape from a 4 × 4 square, as shown.

· Assembly — Fig. E: Interlock the four-armed pinwheel shape with the cross-shaped motifs containing the inward-pointing arrows.

· Assembly — Fig. F: As shown, these four-armed pinwheel shapes can be assembled in four or more different ways, producing different geometric configurations.

Visual Result: As seen in the example below, the contrasting colors make the bright blue arrows radiating around the pink central hubs—the pinwheel shapes—stand out, while the yellow arrows, matching the background color, virtually disappear from view.

pattern with pinwheel shapes

Experiment 3:

· Preparation & Assembly — Fig. G: Combine square tiles containing interior diamond arrangements with tiles featuring four inward- and four outward-pointing arrows formed by negative space. Arrange them alternately to create a checkerboard pattern.

The example below shows a 3 × 3 alternating checkerboard configuration that surprisingly reveals 52 arrows in total.

Variation: Here is a striking variation of the tile with four inward- and outward-pointing arrows. The inward arrows extend into continuous paths on a white background, creating the effect of interwoven arrowed ribbons.

Extra 3D Arrow Illusion

Let’s take a different direction from the experiments above and explore a 3D isometric illusion. This construction is inspired by classic impossible figures depicting ambiguous stacks of cubes, whose apparent number can change depending on how you interpret their spatial arrangement.

Start with a hexagonal boundary (Fig. 1) and overlay a triangular isometric grid (Fig. 2). Then draw six interlocking arrow shapes around a central point, folding their tails inward (Fig. 3).

Finally, use three colors to shade the isometric planes, or apply directional line hatching, to give the flat arrows a three-dimensional, interlocking appearance.

Curious about the mathematics behind these impossible 3D arrows? Math lovers can explore the geometry and construction 👉 here.

Χρόνος and Καιρός

Gianni Sarcone

“The part of life we really live is small. For all the rest of existence is not life, but merely time.” — Seneca

Chronos measures time; Kairos gives it meaning.

The ancient Greeks had more than one word for time.

There was Χρόνος (Chrónos), the time that flows relentlessly, measured by clocks, calendars, and the ageing of our bodies. It is the time that runs, pushes us forward, and often makes us feel we are always late for something.

But the Greeks also spoke of Καιρός (Kairós): the right moment, the opportune moment, the instant when circumstances come together and something becomes possible. Unlike Chronos, Kairos cannot be measured in hours or minutes. It must be recognized.

Perhaps we spend too much of our lives chasing Chronos, when we should sometimes pause and listen for Kairos.

There is a time to sow, a time to harvest, and a time to let the earth rest. There is also a time to act, and a time to wait.

Interestingly, other ancient cultures developed similar ways of thinking about time. In Sanskrit, Kāla (काल) refers to time in its chronological and universal sense, while Ritu (ऋतु) describes time as a season or a qualitative moment—a period defined by its particular nature and significance.

The curious thing is that time does not pass at the same speed for everyone. A minute of anxiety can feel like an hour, while an entire afternoon of happiness may disappear in an instant. A child experiences summer as an eternity; an adult may wonder where the years have gone.

Chronos is the time we share. Kairos is the time we experience.

The deepest mystery of time, for me, is not how quickly it passes, but why it feels so different depending on who we are, what we are doing, and what we are waiting for. Two people can share the same hour, the same year, even the same lifetime, yet experience it in profoundly different ways. The distance between them is not measured in space, but in the way they inhabit time—as if they were living in different dimensions.

Which kind of time are you living in today?

kairos, time experienced

Credit:

The image shows a relief of Kairos, the personification of the opportune moment. Why the long hair at the front and the bald back of his head?

The symbolism is brutally simple: when Kairos approaches, seize him by the hair. Once he has passed, there is nothing to hold on to. No amount of regret can bring the opportunity back.

The original reliefs associated with Kairos are preserved today at the Archaeological Museum of Trogir, Croatia, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.