Deep in the retina, an ancient memory persists. Our visual cells rely on “opsins“—light-sensitive molecules inherited from unicellular organisms that existed long before animals. For over a billion years, life has refined this simple act: catching light. In the sea, the same logic still plays out. Some oysters host algae on their mantle; they feed them, and in return these light-sensitive cells signal the presence of light. A quiet watch system—almost an eye, spread across a surface. In certain algae, like Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, a tiny eyespot—the stigma—is enough to steer the organism toward light. Not an eye, but already a direction, a choice. Our rods and cones extend that first invention: a long lineage of light detectors, slowly shaped over time, linking our vision today to the faint glimmers of the earliest oceans.
In the tiny alga Volvox, a newly found light sensor glows green, showing where it sits around the cell’s center. (Image: Eva Laura von der Heyde / University of Bielefeld)
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.
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.
It’s not uncommon to read, on a snack package, the phrase “with chocolate taste,” often printed in bold uppercase. The wording plays a subtle trick on the mind. Most people assume the product must contain chocolate. Yet a flavor is not a substance. More often than not, what we bite into carries only the impression—an illusion—of chocolate.
The same applies to color. Our brain is just as easily misled. Colors behave like flavors: they may smell—pardon… look—like a particular hue, but they are subjective sensations rather than fixed properties of the outside world. They shift with context, changing according to their surroundings. More striking still, identical colors can appear different under certain conditions, while different colors may look the same. This phenomenon is known as color induction.
Even texture plays a role. It can alter how we perceive a color’s intensity and tone. Take beer and an egg yolk: they may share the same orange hue and gradation. Yet the brain reads them differently. The glass and the liquid are perceived as translucent, so their color seems lighter, duller, more diluted. The yolk, by contrast, appears opaque, with a richer, more glossy, more solid color.
In this picture, the beer and the egg share exactly the same orange gradation.
I’ve always been drawn to impossible objects—those forms that slip between logic and illusion, never fully settling into one or the other.
This piece grew out of an old idea I felt compelled to revisit, almost as if reopening a long-forgotten door. A binary door, in fact—one that leads to two distinct worlds. Depending on how you look at it, it shifts, tilts, and reveals something else.
It starts with pencil on paper. A loose, intuitive phase where the form finds its way. From there, I move into FreeHand MS—an old tool I’ve never quite let go of. It still gives me a certain precision and feel I can’t replace. Finally, I refine the piece in Photoshop, adjusting, balancing, pushing it toward that delicate point where everything holds together.
There’s still work to be done. Something remains unresolved—but maybe that tension is part of what keeps it alive.
“The Master of Numbers” is an Op Art photomosaic portrait of the renowned physicist, created from a collection of photographs of numbers. Each detail contributes to a visual exploration of mathematics, perception, and pattern. The project took me two years to complete, photographing numbers in the most unusual places and objects, and bringing them together into a single portrait.
And a little secret: tucked inside the mosaic is a tiny portrait of me and my wife—a fun, hidden signature and a personal touch.
Limited edition posters and prints are available through my online gallery.
First, observe the alignment of the red circles as they move in a straight vertical path, up and down. Then keep your gaze on one of the three Xs in the middle. What do you notice?
The red circles seem to drift away from their true physical trajectories, as if they were following the curves of the static lines. This perceptual shift is known as the “Mainz-Linez Illusion“.
When you keep your gaze on the central X, the moving dots shift into peripheral vision, where spatial resolution is limited and detail is reduced. The visual system compensates by interpolating missing information based on contextual cues and prior experience. As a result, the dots become perceptually “bound” to the nearby curved lines, as if threaded on them, and their straight vertical motion is misread as oscillating.
The Mainz-Linez phenomenon reflects a broader principle: peripheral vision is largely constructive. Under certain conditions, this predictive filling-in can also distort motion judgments in real-world tasks—such as driving—where events in the periphery may be misperceived.
My minimalist tribute to M. C. Escher: an animated “impossible waterfall,” drawn frame by frame. It’s not exactly my usual artistic language, but I had great fun creating it, and I hope you’ll enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.
As you can see, the isometric structure links impossible angles to create a continuous water channel that appears to flow upward in a loop, falling from a high point yet seemingly returning to the top.
The “impossible waterfall,” reimagined in a lavish Rococo style, rendered as a surreal illustration for a book project.
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.
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.
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.
Some say abstract art is non-representational—that it avoids visual reality and relies on color, shape, form, and gesture to trigger emotion or thought. I see it differently. Abstraction does not reject reality; it reframes it. It is a change of optics, not a disappearance of the world.
Take, for example, this video of goldfinches perched on swaying thistles. At first glance, does it not resemble an abstract painting? Rhythms, repetitions, subtle chromatic tensions, forms dissolving into movement. From there, one could push the abstraction further with the slightest shifts in shape or color—without betraying reality, only rephrasing it.
This idea is hardly new. From Cézanne’s insistence on treating nature through cylinder, sphere, and cone, to Kandinsky’s claim that abstraction reveals inner necessity rather than surface likeness, many artists and thinkers have argued that abstraction sharpens perception instead of diluting it. Even in cognitive science, perception is understood as an active construction, not a passive recording of facts.
Abstraction starts precisely there: with attention. Not with denial, not with decoration, but with the recognition that reality is already structured, already abstract, long before the artist intervenes.
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