2005
Acrylic,
various dimensions
Inv. 2005.1024/Acquired with the aid
of the FRAM Île-de-France
Notice
Felice Varini works on the space and the
issue of its perception based on the
construction of viewpoints. His geometric
works hold forth about architecture, on the
scale of an interior, a street or a
neighbourhood. Developed at the very end of
the 1970s, their processes appear to derive
from Daniel Buren’s in situ works and
Sol LeWitt’s large wall drawings.
For the opening of the MAC/VAL in 2005,
Felice Varini marked the museum’s hallway
with an installation painted straight on
the walls, the windows and the ceiling of
the building. He strategically chose an
area where people move about, and where
visitors on the move have a chance to
increase their viewpoints of the work.
Based on a pre-prepared composition on a
photograph of the venue, he inscribed twodimensional
forms on this architecture,
exploded throughout the depth of the room
thanks to a simple overhead projector. The
circular drawings thus projected, first
marked in pencil, were painted in acrylic.
Working on the principle of anamorphosis,1
three large vermillion circles, floating
forms in a virtual plane, appear to the
onlooker in the precise place of the
initial projection, proposing a secret
viewpoint on the building, its design and
its distinctive features. Elsewhere in the
space, the visitor sees just a jumble of
curved lines looking chaotic and
fragmented, and extremely dynamic.
The process used to conceive and execute
the work is based on the rules of
perspective used since the Renaissance to
create a make-believe depth in the picture,
but involving a total reversal. Whereas
the system invented by Brunelleschi focuses
the vanishing lines on a single point of
a plane to create a make-believe space in
it, Felice Varini’s work re-establishes
the projection of the three-dimensional
perspective pyramid and extends it into
the onlooker’s very space. Vanishing point
becomes viewpoint, at the heart of the
viewer’s eyeball. This latter is then put
into a situation of perception in which
optical experience is combined with the
sheer pleasure of illusion, linked with the
appearance of a falsely misleading image.
In 2010, by updating an inaugural work
that marked the view of this building
with its modernist lines, artist and museum
played with the recent memory of the
institution and its public.
M.G. 1. An anamorphosis is a distorted perspective in which the image is unrecognisable except from a precise vantage point.