Color

YAACOV AGAM — YOU NEVER SEE IT ALL

Gianni Sarcone

“When I finish a work, it is just starting.” — Yaacov Agam

One of my favorite Op Art artists and a true visionary, Yaacov Agam (Hebrew: יעקב אגם) was a pioneer of kinetic and Op Art. His work explored movement, color, time, and perception, making the viewer an active part of the artwork rather than a passive observer.

Born in Rishon LeZion in 1928, Agam studied at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and later with Johannes Itten in Zurich. He moved to Paris in 1951, where he became one of the leading figures of the European avant-garde. His first solo exhibition was held there in 1953.

Agam died in June 2026, at 98, after receiving the Israel Prize for Visual Arts. His work is represented in major museums around the world.

Among his most remarkable achievements is the Salon Agam, commissioned by President Georges Pompidou for the private apartments of the Élysée Palace and created between 1972 and 1974. Now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, it is essentially a kinetic environment: walls, doors, ceiling, carpet, color and geometric forms change as the viewer moves through the space.

Agam understood something fundamental about visual art: the work is not always what you see. It is also what happens when you move, look again, and see something different.

The Deceptive Oriental Fan

Gianni Sarcone

One of my earliest color illusions, created back in the 1990s, when I was immersed in exploring the physiology of color perception.

Do the pleated sections of the fan really have two different shades of brown?

They don’t. Every pleated “accordion” section is exactly the same brown. Only the thin light and dark bands bordering each fold differ. Those subtle edge contrasts trick your visual system into seeing alternating tones where none exist.

The color is perfectly uniform, but your brain interprets it differently depending on the surrounding contrast—a classic example of simultaneous brightness contrast.

Seeing Is Not What It Seems

Gianni Sarcone

Color is energy—an electromagnetic phenomenon shaped by how light is reflected from objects. What we call vision is not innate. It is largely learned, built through a slow and demanding process. We tend to take it for granted, yet someone born blind who later gains sight must spend years learning how to organize and interpret what now enters the eyes.

Seeing is neither simple nor passive. When we look at a landscape, color information reaches the visual cortex in roughly 30 milliseconds (in the occipital lobe, V1). Only a fraction later—around 70 milliseconds—shape, depth, and motion begin to emerge. In these brief intervals, the brain filters, compares, and reconstructs fragments of data, assembling them into a coherent image. What we perceive is not a direct recording of reality but a refined interpretation—an internal best guess shaped for meaning and action.

The way we see

I’ve long been intrigued by the way people with partial or total visual loss engage with the world. Any serious reflection on perception or optical illusion eventually meets its counterpoint. Understanding how they “see” without sight reveals the real weight of vision itself—and how inseparably it works with the other senses, each one calibrating the rest.

When we see, move, speak, and feel at once, what actually binds sight to touch or hearing? The truth is, we notice far less than we assume. We attend only to what matters in the moment. Without the constant support of the other senses, perception would collapse into confusion, because they operate quietly in the background, guiding everyday behavior.

A striking example comes from research on inattentional blindness. In a well-known 1999 experiment by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, participants watched a video and counted basketball passes between two teams. Nearly 40 percent failed to notice a person in a gorilla suit walking through the scene, pausing, even dancing, before exiting. The demonstration is disarming in its simplicity: we do not see what we do not attend to—even when it stands directly in front of us.

→ Source.

Creating a New Impossible Cube: From Concept to Print

Gianni Sarcone

Impossible or undecidable figures have long fascinated artists, mathematicians, and viewers alike. Their appeal lies in a delicate tension: the structure appears perfectly logical at first glance, yet closer inspection reveals spatial contradictions that cannot exist in the physical world. My latest work revisits an idea I first explored in the 1990s—an impossible Rubik’s-style cube—now developed into a new series built across several stages, from hand-drawn construction to digital refinement and photographic interpretation.

The project began with a simple geometric framework—interlocking beams arranged to suggest a stable cubic volume. The challenge was to reinterpret an apparently ordinary three-dimensional cube into an ambiguous form that still appears structurally plausible. Through careful adjustments of line weight, contrast, and directional and formal cues, the cube gradually shifts from perceived solidity to spatial uncertainty, so that as the eye moves across the image, the object quietly reorganizes itself, producing a surreal perception in place of a coherent physical structure.

impossible cube
Here is the original version of the project, refined from my initial hand-drawn construction and carefully reconstructed using FreeHand MX

Two of the final images belong to the Op Art tradition, where sharp black-and-white geometry emphasizes visual tension and rhythmic structure. These compositions highlight the cube’s architectural clarity while allowing the paradox to emerge naturally from the viewer’s perceptual processing. The remaining two images take a different path: they present the object in a photographic setting, rendered with realistic lighting and textures.

impossible cube etched
Astraea Paradox Cube: Available as fine art print.
Rubik’s Paradox Cube: Available as fine art print.

Together, the four images form a small visual narrative—construction, transformation, and illusion—showing how a purely conceptual structure can evolve into multiple aesthetic forms. The Op Art versions focus on perceptual mechanics, while the photographic interpretations suggest how an impossible form might inhabit the physical world, even if only in appearance.

Fine art prints and canvas editions from this series are available through my official gallery shop, where each piece is produced using archival materials designed for long-term display.

Collectors and galleries interested in larger formats or special editions may also contact me directly for availability and production details. This series continues my exploration of perceptual geometry, where simple shapes become instruments for questioning how we construct space, depth, and visual certainty.

Minimal Perception

Gianni Sarcone

I’ve always wondered about the limits of shape and color needed for us to represent or recognize an object. Take a stemmed glass, for example. To depict it, you might need just two circles and a straight line—and perhaps a red disc to suggest the wine inside.

But we can go further: by turning it from a flat image into a 3D form with a simple rotational movement, like in Duchamp’s rotoreliefs, the object suddenly comes alive in space.

All these graphic shortcuts rely on memory. Our brains interpret what we see based on past experience, filling in missing information and reconstructing the object from just a few essential cues. This process aligns with the principles of visual perception: the Gestalt laws of closure and continuity explain why we perceive a complete glass even when much of it is absent. Minimalist perception highlights how human cognition distills visual information, showing that a few simple shapes and colors are enough to evoke a rich, instantly recognizable image.

☞ Duchamp rotoreliefs.

Ananke’s Die

Gianni Sarcone

A simple study in visual perception—an exploration of how a plain hexagon can evolve into the illusion of a cube. Through precise geometry and controlled form blending, static lines awaken into rhythm and volume, giving rise to a subtle sense of depth and movement.

Constructing the Illusion

Fig. A — The Base Shape
Start with a regular hexagon. Divide it into three equal diamond shapes (rhombuses)—these represent the three visible faces of the cube. Each diamond has four equal sides: two acute angles (60°) and two obtuse angles (120°). Together, they form the geometric foundation of the cube.

Fig. B — Building Volume with Shape Blends
In Illustrator, or any other vector software, use the Blend Tool to create a shape blend inside each diamond. Start with a small central circle and blend it toward the outer edge of the diamond. Adjust the number of blend steps to control how smooth or tight the transition appears. This process builds the cube’s apparent volume and visual tension. You’ll notice that the distance from corner to corner in the nested, diamond-like shapes is slightly greater than from side to side, creating subtle gaps that lead the eye to perceive an X across the surface.

Fig. C — Perspective and Transformation
Distort slightly the hexagon to set the three diamonds in perspective. This step transforms the flat figure into a die-like cube, giving it spatial depth and presence.

ananke cube

Enhancing the Optical Effect
Next, add horizontal background lines and some color, as shown in the two examples in the image. You can also adjust the illusion by making the visible faces of the die appear slightly concave, as in the figure on the right. This effect is created by shifting the concentric, nested diamond shapes slightly off-center—the position of the central ellipse determines whether the die appears concave or convex.

two Ananke dice

Below is the finished stage of the work. Curiously, the cube appears to hover, slide, and even emit a faint blue glow—though it remains entirely black and motionless.
Ananke’s Die is a study I began in 2010, a continuing exploration of how repetitive lines and geometric precision can trick the mind into sensing motion and color where none exist.

Ananke die

You can get Ananke’s Die as a fine art print or canvas, available in different sizes and finishes.
👉 Buy it here

Why Ananke’s Die

I titled this work Ananke’s Die after Ananke, the Greek goddess of necessity and fate.
The cube, a symbol of structure, represents order and control. Yet the three visible faces that seem to define its volume are an illusion—shifting and unstable.
Under the viewer’s gaze, the shape changes, its meaning shifts, yet the form remains.
This illusory die shows the balance between order, perception, and destiny, reminding us that what we think we control often exists within the unpredictable interplay of vision and inevitability.

This image also triggers multiple associations in a loop: hexagon, cube, die, chance, illusion, order, fate, contradiction. These connections show how perception mixes stability and randomness, revealing that what we see is shaped as much by the mind as by reality.

The Story of Blue

Gianni Sarcone 
Sonne au comble de l'or
l'azur du jeune hiver
– Paul Valéry

For me, blue is air, wind, melancholy. It is like a Fellini film—always haunted by the whisper of the wind, the scent of things, and the fleeting moments of time we wish we could hold in an eternal present. Blue can carry regret; it is, in a way, a conservative principle. Blue has always held a strange duality: so immediate, yet once so elusive. Looking back to antiquity, it fascinates me that Homer never described the sea as blue, but as ‘wine-dark.’ In Greek, kyaneos evoked a dark, mineral depth, while glaukos hovered between gray, green, and blue. The Romans spoke of caeruleus, tied to the sky (caelum), and of lividus, the bruised, bluish tone of flesh. They never elevated blue; it was the color of outsiders, the hue of Celts painted in woad. Only the Egyptians seemed to truly revere it. They invented Egyptian blue, the first artificial pigment, and made it the shade of eternity and the divine.

In the Middle Ages, blue nearly vanished from prominence. Christian art turned to red, white, and black, leaving blue to the margins. Yet the word itself was evolving. The Germanic blāo—and its Vulgar Latin adoption, blavus—once meant something far less precise: shimmering, lustrous, dark, gray, even pale or yellowish. That ambiguity makes me realize how fluid color once was, before language fixed its boundaries. From blāo we inherited English blue and French bleu. Meanwhile, through Arabic lazaward came the words azure, azzurro, and azul, all born from lapis lazuli.

Then, in the 12th century, blue was transformed. Artists began clothing the Virgin Mary in ultramarine, ground from lapis lazuli more costly than gold. What had been humble became heavenly. Heraldry embraced azure as one of its noble tinctures, and kings like Louis IX made blue their emblem. A forgotten hue became a sacred, regal presence.

By the Renaissance, ultramarine shone as a color of prestige, truth, and constancy. Painters reserved it for the highest subjects, poets linked it to loyalty, and explorers carried its name across the seas as azul. Blue had finally claimed its place.

The modern era democratized it. Prussian blue appeared in 1704, followed by cobalt, cerulean, and synthetic ultramarine. Blue poured into uniforms, flags, and revolutions; it became the shade of liberty, of nations, of collective identity. Goethe called it spiritual, a color that retreats yet draws the soul inward.

In the 20th century, painters gave blue an entirely new destiny. The Expressionists used blue to conjure emotion, depth, and inner turbulence—think of Kandinsky, who saw blue as moving ‘toward the infinite,’ or Franz Marc, who painted blue animals to symbolize spirituality and hope. Even Van Gogh’s Starry Night swirls with blue, capturing both wonder and melancholy. Later, Picasso entered his Blue Period, transmuting sorrow into tone. Yves Klein went further still, reducing blue to its purest intensity with his International Klein Blue, turning it into an immaterial field of experience. For Klein, blue was not simply a color but ‘the most abstract color of all,’ a space in which one could lose oneself.

Today, I see blue everywhere. In the jeans that became the fabric of daily life. In corporate logos designed to inspire trust. In flags that mark belonging. Blue is calm, yet melancholy; humble, yet exalted. Once overlooked, it is now the world’s favorite color.

Blue is more than a hue. It is an idea shaped across centuries—etymologically born of caelum, blāo, and blavus; symbolically stretched between heaven and earth; culturally tied to faith, power, and identity. Its story mirrors our own: restless, mutable, and ever searching for meaning.

I’ll end with a little story from my own family. After World War II, my paternal grandfather, a house painter, bought a massive surplus of blue paint from the military. He had so much of it that whenever a client asked how he planned to paint their home, his answer was always the same, year after year: “All in blue, yes, all in blue…” (in our dialect, tutt’azzurr, tutt’azzurr).

That simple phrase stuck. Before long, the whole village started calling our family the Tuttazzurr family, and I myself became known as Giuan Tuttazzurr. Blue marked our home, but also my identity and my story—etched in memory and in name.

Moonlight Reflections on the Waters

Gianni Sarcone

A memory from Japan, where I lived briefly in the 1980s. This piece recalls earthy colors, organic shapes, and fragments of that time. A circle emerges from a flowing field of triangles—like ripples of moonlight dancing on the sea near Kamakura.

Moonlight Reflections on the Waters of Kamakura (1998, collage)
Moonlight Reflections on the Waters of Kamakura (1998, collage)

Immersing in my Op Art is entering a space where opposing forces meet, interlock, and balance with precision and intensity. Each piece is a silent dialogue of form, line, color, perception, and mathematical structure, anchored in the language of symbols. Beneath the surface, it engages archetypes and ancient rites that still resonate in the collective unconscious.

Moonlight Reflections on the Waters of Kamakura (1998, collage) II
Moonlight Reflections on the Waters of Kamakura (1998, collage)

This unique op art piece is available as fine art prints and canvases in my online gallery.

Smelling the Color 9: When Numbers Take Shape and Color

Gianni Sarcone

In English, the expression to smell the color 9 describes something completely impossible…

And yet, some people have the unusual ability to mentally visualize colors or spatial patterns when thinking about units of time—or more broadly, numbers. This phenomenon, known as synesthesia (from the Greek syn, “together”, and aisthēsis, “sensation”), occurs when stimulation of one sense involuntarily triggers sensations in another. It’s not a figure of speech—these perceptions feel very real to those who experience them.

The first documented case in medical literature appeared in 1710. Dr. John Thomas Woolhouse (1650–1734), an ophthalmologist to King James II of England, reported a blind young man who claimed he could perceive colors induced by sounds.

Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and his team at the University of California, San Diego, observed that the most common form of synesthesia links “graphemes“—letters or numbers—to specific colors. Since my work bridges art and mathematics, I’ll focus here on number-based synesthesia.

People who experience synesthesia in its pure form are relatively few. However, many report strikingly similar associations between numbers and colors or spatial layouts, suggesting these perceptions aren’t just products of imagination or attention-seeking. For example, number–form synesthesia may result from cross-activation between brain regions in the parietal lobe that handle numerical and spatial processing. In contrast, number–color synesthesia likely stems from an overabundance of connections between adjacent areas that interfere with each other when triggered (see fig. 1 below).

brain synesthesia

Figures 2 and 3 illustrate common synesthetic patterns—either as color associations (fig. 2) or spatial arrangements (fig. 3, based on observations by Sir Francis Galton). Statistically, people often associate the digits 0 or 1—and sometimes 8 or 9—with black or white. Yellow, red, and blue are typically linked to smaller digits like 2, 3, or 4, while brown, purple, and gray tend to be tied to larger ones like 6, 7, or 8. Curiously, it’s not the idea of the number but the visual form of the digit that seems to trigger the sensation. For instance, when the number 5 is shown as the Roman numeral V, many synesthetes report no color at all.

color number synesthesia

And you—do you see numbers in color or arranged in space? Feel free to share your synesthetic experiences with me.