Le mie opere, esposte permanentemente alla Città della Scienza e al Dipartimento di Fisica dell’UNIFI, offrono un’esperienza visiva che stimola curiosità e meraviglia. Non perdere l’occasione di vederle dal vivo!
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🇬🇧 Dive into the world of optical art!
My works, on permanent display at Città della Scienza and the Physics Department of UNIFI, offer a visual journey that sparks curiosity and wonder. Don’t miss the chance to experience them in person!
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“The Responsive Eye,” held at MoMA in 1965 and organized by William C. Seitz, was a landmark exhibition in Op Art. Featuring over 100 artists—including Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely, Richard Anuszkiewicz, and Josef Albers—it explored how geometric patterns and color could manipulate perception.
Riley stood out with her precise, rhythmic paintings that seemed to move and breathe, challenging the way we see. The show fascinated the public, drawing huge crowds, and sparked a wave of interest in optical effects across art, design, and fashion.
Critics were divided. Some celebrated its innovation and playful engagement with vision; others dismissed it as flashy spectacle, questioning the depth and seriousness of Op Art. Personally, I see it as a pivotal moment—one that reminded everyone that perception itself could be the medium, and that art could be both cerebral and exhilarating.
Further information: https://ubu.com/film/depalma_responsive.html
I’ve always been drawn to the architecture of geometry. The hexagon, with its quiet strength and symmetry, sits at the root of so many spatial illusions—it’s the seed of cubes, isometric grids, and 3D paradoxes. From this shape, I began exploring structures that bend logic and perception, eventually giving life to a trio of optical works: Enigma 1, Enigma 2, and Enigma 3.
Each piece is built around the visual tension of the impossible cube, created by merging two tribars in perfect isometric perspective. The lines suggest solidity, yet the form escapes reality—what looks structurally sound unravels the moment the eye tries to make sense of it. That’s the game I love to play: where geometry behaves, but perception rebels.
These “Enigmas” are spatial riddles dressed in stripes and angles, each one twisting the viewer’s reading of depth, volume, and continuity in its own way.
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.
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.
This unique op art piece is available as fine art prints and canvases in my online gallery.
I’ve been toying with the idea of revisiting an old, low-key material for my art: Flutex.
If you haven’t heard of it, Flutex is a patterned industrial glass from the 1930s and ’40s, mostly used to give a bit of privacy in bathrooms and office partitions.
In the ’70s, Op artist Sydney Cash started playing with this glass and found that its ribbed surface works like a lenticular screen—showing different images depending on how you look at it. The effect? Hypnotic, shifting artworks that change as you move around them.
It’s just simple glass, but it tricks perception in a really cool way.
I’m seriously considering giving it a try myself—there’s something about that mix of humble material and complex visual play that feels worth exploring again.
Here are two relative size illusions I described back in 1997 and 2013.
The first, called Sarcone’s Crosses, challenges classic illusions like the Ebbinghaus illusion (Titchener Circles, 1898) and the Obonai square illusion (1954). It features a cross (the test shape) surrounded by squares of different sizes.
As shown in Fig. 1.a, 1.b, and 1.c, the three blue crosses are all the same size — yet the one on the left (Fig. 1.a) appears larger. Surprisingly, the illusion still works even when smaller squares completely cover the cross (Fig. 1.c).
So, the size of surrounding shapes doesn’t always dictate how we perceive the central one.
In the second illusion (Fig. 2.a and 2.b), due to assimilation, the red diagonal inside the larger ellipse seems longer — but the blue line is actually the longest.
Perception loves to play tricks on us.
You can explore more of my illusions and visual inventions on my official site: giannisarcone.com
Although I’ve been working in the field of Op Art since the mid-1980s, it’s important to recognize that the movement itself has a deeper history. It began to take shape in the 1960s, led by pioneering figures such as Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley.
However, the artists who truly captivate me—the ones who expanded the language of perception—are often the outsiders. One such figure is Julio Le Parc (b. September 23, 1928), an Argentine-born artist whose practice bridges Op Art and kinetic art. Le Parc studied at the School of Fine Arts in Argentina and went on to co-found the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV). His work, honored with numerous awards, holds a prominent place in Latin American modernism.
Le Parc’s recurring themes—color, light, and movement—have always resonated with me. During the ’60s and ’70s, he explored light not just as a visual element but as a living, dynamic material. Yet by the late ’70s, his presence in the art world had faded; his output became sporadic, and for decades his work slipped quietly out of the international spotlight.
Fortunately, recent years have witnessed a renewed appreciation of his explorations in light and movement, bringing his contributions once again to the attention of a wider public.
Artist’s Website: http://www.julioleparc.org
Book: Catalog of the artist’s first solo exhibition, Paris, November–December 1966. Text in French by Frank Popper.
Back in the ’90s, my board game Trama made waves for its fresh take on strategy and design. Imagine the logic of chess, but with a twist: neutral pieces that both players can use. The board—plexiglass with screen-printed art—echoes the feel of an Op Art piece, while the Galalith tokens add tactile charm.
There are several design variants, with boards featuring different color schemes and patterns. Some versions include holes or extruded circular reliefs to securely hold marbles instead of tokens—offering a fresh, sensory-rich experience.
· Curious? The full rulebook (in French) is 👉 here.
· More about 👉 Trama.
If you’re a manufacturer interested in bringing Trama back to the table, feel free to reach out.
The path from misdirection to revelation is at the heart of how illusion and wonder spark insight. Misdirection steers our attention—often subtly—away from what truly matters. It disrupts our expectations, creating a gap between what we see and what is. Within that gap lies the illusion: a crafted discrepancy, a visual or cognitive sleight-of-hand that unsettles our perception.
But the magic doesn’t end there. When the illusion is cracked—when the mind shifts, recalibrates, and sees—the famous Aha! moment erupts. That flash of understanding isn’t just delightful; it’s deeply educational. It rewires how we interpret the world.
This sequence—misdirection, illusion, revelation—mirrors the creative process itself. It shows how confusion, when carefully designed, can be a gateway to clarity. In the right hands, illusion is not deception—it’s a tool to awaken curiosity, stretch perception, and provoke insight. Wonder, in this sense, becomes a powerful cognitive catalyst.
That’s why my art and, I believe, my writing, revolve around this sense of wonder—arguably the most direct and playful route to that pleasurable, often conflicting moment of insight: the sudden discovery of something previously unknown.
One of my illusions from the late ’90s. Take a look at the colorful umbrellas in Figures A and B of the table below—are they the same or different? About 80% of people will say that Umbrella A has jagged, zigzag edges, while Umbrella B has a smooth, wavy outline. But here’s the trick—you’ve been fooled by the brightness contrast of the rays inside the umbrellas. In reality, both umbrellas are identical in shape, perfectly congruent.
This illusion works even when only the lines of the shapes are emphasized. As demonstrated in the table below, the outline of Umbrella A appears jagged and zigzagged, while Umbrella B seems to have, once again, a smooth, wavy outline.
This illusion shows a phenomenon called curvature blindness, which was rediscovered in 2017 by Japanese psychologist Kohske Takahashi. He created a powerful variant and studied its impact on how we perceive shapes.
