Anamorphosis

Impossible Beach Cabin

Gianni Sarcone
impossible house sketch

With summer just around the corner, I find myself drifting back to the shores of time, to this delightfully impossible little structure perched on the beach.

A drawing concept created for a children’s coloring book on optical illusions. Over the years, I’ve explored this theme through many curious and playful variations.

impossible house

Are the kids engaging in creative activities inside the cabin or outside it?

The roof insists we’re looking at the exterior, while the floor pulls us firmly indoors. Both readings feel correct, yet they cancel each other out. So, there’s no clean resolution here—just a quiet visual paradox.

Curious to see more of my optical illusion book concepts, impossible worlds, and mind-bending creations? Take a stroll through my author page.

impossible house poster

The idea itself is far from new and has inspired countless artists, architects, and photographers. It even exists in three dimensions. A notable example is Roy Lichtenstein‘s House I (1996), an ingenious sculpture that appears to be a solid house but is actually a concave construction made of angled steel planes. As viewers move around it, the structure seems to rotate and reshape itself, turning perception into part of the artwork.

Perspective Optical Illusions: The art of circling the square

Gianni Sarcone

When bending the sides of a square structure forward, each edge forming a sine wave shape, the structure reveals a circle when viewed from the reverse angle. This illusion plays with perspective, specifically utilizing an effect known as “anamorphosis“.

Anamorphosis refers to a artistic technique that uses perspective to create distorted images that can only be viewed correctly from a specific angle.

Subliminal Faces

Gianni Sarcone

This series of works questions the many cognitive aspects of faces’ recognition. People often see hidden faces in things, clouds, landscapes, or in architectural structures… Finding the latent or virtual image hidden in the manifest image is a mental process related to the concept of the “lost object” used in psychoanalysis. As an artist, I enjoy including subliminal messages or figures in my work. My paintings, photographs and collages play on the foreground and background relationship of our visual perception and represent common or iconic faces the viewer has to rediscover.

The Master of Numbers
Collage – mixed media, 2006

Photomosaic portrait of Albert Einstein made with random photographs of numbers.
It is only when the viewer moves away from the image that the portrait of Einstein appears. It is the distance that creates and unveils the truth, because everything is relative as Einstein once said and everything depends on the context, the environment or the point of view.

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Mephistopheles and Margaretta, a double statue

Gianni Sarcone

The “Salar Jung Museum” is an art museum located at Dar-ul-Shifa, on the southern bank of the Musi River in the city of Hyderabad, Telangana, India. In this museum is exhibited a captivating double-figure wood sculpture built in the 19th century A.D. in France. It stands before a mirror and shows the facade of a nonchalant Mephistopheles and the image of a demure Margaretta in the mirror.

The wooden double statue of ‘Mephistopheles and Margaretta’ representing evil and good are characters from Goethe’s famous work ‘Dr.Faust’ (1808) and tells the story of love, heroism and tragedy.

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Urban Butterflies

Gianni Sarcone

Mantra is a French muralist and street artist, born in Metz (East of France) in 1987. He is a self-taught artist and currently one of the most important “avant-garde” graffiti artists in Europe.

Having developed over many years a very personal technique and skills, Mantra is able to realize artworks on any surface and of all scales using a great level of detail and realism. Mantra’s artwork bring concrete walls to life around the world, from Zaragoza, to Paris, passing by Vienna, Lima, Seattle, Brussels, Quito and Bogota.

The artist pays tribute to his childhood exotic heroes (butterflies, owls, spiders, birds…) in a realistic and lively style, like a mirror reflecting on the cries of a nature that we don’t hear anymore.

I love butterflies… There is no doubt that they have significant meanings to us. Butterflies are deep and powerful representations of life. Many cultures associate them with our souls. Around the world, people view the butterfly as representing endurance, change, hope, and life.

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Godzilla could turn off that switch!

Gianni Sarcone

on_off_switch Escif is a Spanish muralist and street artist, most of his work can be found in the streets of his town, Valencia, but also in countries such as Canada, France, Italy, Poland and more.
The use of subdued colors and simple lines helps the artist make a humorous statement on various sensitive social or political issues, like in this gigantic mural for Poland’s “Katowice Street Art Festival”.

Juxtaposed next to those who passers-by, the artwork looks ridiculously large. Carefully painting just a few colors, Escif gives the illusion that some sort of giant can really turn off that switch!

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Would you dare run on it?

Gianni Sarcone

This wavy floor is actually a mind-boggling optical illusion that discourages people from running down the hallway (in fact, the floor is a completely flat surface!).

Manchester firm Casa Ceramica used a neat combination of black and white tiles to make the floor along the hallway look as though it is uneven making the tiles appear to slope away into a dip.

floor illusion 2

The illusion only works in one direction, so you will be perfectly safe on the way out.

floor illusion

The making of the floor.

Many visual illusions have already been used to try and slow down traffic like this 3D-painted zebra crossing trialed in Iceland that provides an illusory effect of white blocks floating over the road.

zebra-cross illusion