Perception

Bear-ly Seal

Gianni Sarcone

People often ask where my ideas come from. There is no single answer. They tend to surface quietly, shaped by places I’ve seen and cultures I’ve crossed.

“Seal or Bear?” grew out of that kind of moment. An animal suspended in the vastness of a frozen world—emerging from an ice hole, yet refusing to settle into a single identity. Is it a polar bear? A seal? Or something that holds both readings at once?

Bear of seal?

The idea came to me while traveling through northern Canada, surrounded by the stillness of Arctic landscapes and the deep presence of Inuit traditions. That silence has a way of sharpening perception—of making ambiguity feel natural rather than puzzling.

First created in the 1990s, the illusion went on to become a reference point in visual perception studies and later found its way into textbooks.

More recently, the “Seal or Bear?” illusion will be featured by the NHK Educational Corporation as part of a 2026–2027 educational series on psychology and visual perception.

The Borromean Tribar

Gianni Sarcone

This form belongs to the family of impossible figures, more specifically to the Penrose triangle, or tribar.

impossible figure

At first glance, it looks entirely manufacturable. The structure appears to be made from three identical square rings (Fig. 1), each pierced by a circular opening and arranged in three mutually perpendicular planes (Fig. 2). Together, they seem to interlock seamlessly, forming an impossible three-dimensional tribar that evokes a trefoil knot and its endless over-under weaving.

If this sculpture looks physically realizable to you, congratulations: your visual system has just accepted a geometric impossibility.

the making of the borromean tribar

Could such an object be built? Not exactly. One solution would be to twist one of the junctions slightly, but that trick would be immediately noticeable here because some of the angles would no longer appear perfectly square (90°), as shown in the picture below. Another possibility would be to leave a small gap at one junction and view the sculpture from a carefully chosen angle, allowing perspective to hide the discontinuity.

This is how a real 3D Borromean Tribar would appear…

The Eternal Return

Gianni Sarcone

At times, I find myself resembling the shipwrecked man from The Invention of Morel, stranded on an island that at first appears deserted, almost welcoming in its deceptive silence. Yet something soon shifts. The people who inhabit it do not see him. He moves among them like a breath, a weightless trace, already slipping out of reality.

Gradually, he understands that his invisibility is not accidental. These bodies, these gestures, this frozen summer light… all obey another logic. A repetition. A projection. Life here has become mechanical memory, the reconstruction of vanished moments, orchestrated by a machine born of obsession.

And in the face of this unsettling truth, a decisive turn emerges: remain outside, intact and separate, or step into the image, accept dissolution within the cycle at the cost of one’s own substance.

The story leaves behind an unnameable imprint—a nostalgia without object, as if something within us recognized a scene already lived elsewhere. It opens a fissure in what we call reality: its fragility, its occasional nature as stable illusion, and the strange condition of the individual who must vanish in order to fully belong to what he contemplates.

A film worth seeking out, or even better, the novel by Adolfo Bioy Casares on which it is based—brief in form, but long-lasting in its quiet afterlife within memory.

l'invenzione di Morel
Immortality, Love & Loneliness
the island
The island as described by Adolfo Bioy Casares

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
Available as fine art print from my online gallery.

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.

Born into Iki

Gianni Sarcone

I am iki from birth.

But what is iki (粋)?

Edo, under the Tokugawa shogunate. Merchants wealthy enough to unsettle the hierarchy, yet still ranked below the samurai. Power without status—watched closely, dressed carefully.

Sumptuary laws did the rest: no gold, no loud silk, no bright declarations. Only browns, greys, indigo. A forced muting of visibility.

Constraint rarely suppresses imagination. It concentrates it.

From this narrow register emerged a refined spectrum known as Shijuhattcha Hyakunezumi (四十八茶百鼠)—“48 browns, 100 greys.” Not literal numbers, but a cultural way of naming excess within restraint: an almost infinite sensitivity to difference inside what first appears uniform.

Fashion became a coded language. Subtle shifts in tone, legible only to trained eyes. Outside, discipline. Inside, excess held in reserve. A lining of rare fabric. A color hidden against the skin. A private flash revealed only when a sleeve turns in the wind.

This is iki: elegance that refuses emphasis. Presence without display. A form of refinement that collapses the moment it is named.

Its opposite is yabo (野暮): excess, insistence, the compulsion to be seen. Not morality—measure. Or the lack of it.

Today, the direction has inverted. Visibility has become currency. Those who do not perform disappear; those who do not declare are not counted. What was once failure has become strategy.

And yet the counter-move remains simple.

Lower the volume. Leave gaps. Let meaning breathe in what is not shown.

And become something worth looking at twice.

Minimal Cat

Gianni Sarcone

A Zen-inspired sumi-e unicursal brushstroke that gently evokes the silhouette of a sleeping cat.

sumi-e zen cat
sleeping cat
pencil studies

A single brushstroke, almost nothing… and yet the mind completes the rest.
This Zen-inspired sumi-e line suggests the presence of a sleeping cat, as the brain instinctively searches for form, balance, memory, and meaning within this minimal stroke. A curve becomes a back, a pause becomes a head, and empty space turns into stillness—peace, quietude itself. Strangely, this allegorical curve echoes the Japanese symbol ensō (円相; “circular form”), often drawn in calligraphy as a gesture that holds completeness and imperfection in the same breath.

Minimal drawing works because perception is never passive. We do not simply “see” the world; we continuously reconstruct it from fragments. A few essential marks are enough for the imagination to awaken and project life into absence. The unfinished image invites the viewer to participate in its creation.

This is one of the quiet powers of strict minimalism: removing detail does not always diminish reality — sometimes it amplifies it. In sumi-e, what is omitted matters as much as what is painted. The void is not empty; it breathes. Perhaps that is why a simple unicursal stroke can feel strangely alive.

Art begins precisely there: at the threshold where perception, imagination, and silence meet.

Speleology of Love – Figure–Ground Embrace

Gianni Sarcone

An illusion carved in emotion—can you spot the hidden lovers within?

I created this illustration for a commissioned series examining the underlying strata of interpersonal intimacy.

Gestalt vision

This black-and-white composition plays on figure–ground reversal. At first glance, it reads as a cave opening with a line of climbers moving along a rugged ridge. Look again, and the void resolves into the soft profile of two faces, suspended in the instant before a kiss.

Interested in commissioning my work to illustrate your next editorial project or conceptual series? Let’s discuss how we can bring your vision to light.

The stark contrast and clean silhouettes lend themselves naturally to large-scale applications. On a façade, the image finds a natural home as a mural in a Swiss village, where the alpine setting mirrors the climbers’ ascent.

Algae in my eyes

Gianni Sarcone

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)

→ Further reading.

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.