Friday, 09-Sep-11 21:40:00 CEST

Merged Massive Glass Cubes

After this autumns series of illusionistic paintings I was left with one idea to work out. It was not going to be illusionistic in the way that it would be a clearly impossible figure. My impossible figures are often the result of imagining possible figures. I imagine three dimensional objects that I swivel around in my head and combine and “look at” from various angles and then when an idea has started to form I start drawing it on a paper.

Until now I had been working with opaque objects for the illusionistic paintings; objects hiding something that comes back differently from behind a ribbon or a bar; objects with sharp elbows as if they were steel beams. One theme this spring has been to bend the beams and investigate round shapes and how to make illusions out of that.

When I worked on the round shaped illusions it occurred to me that if objects were transparent then you would be able to push one object into another and see through the objects as if they were made of glass. So here is a painting based on this idea. It is three cubes and they are pushed into each other. If you do that in reality you get a collision or you get that one object when pushed into another object is in itself is intact but here in this painting that although one cube is pushed into another that other cube is also pushed into the other cube. So the remarkable thing with these objects is that they leave no visible damage on each other. This is impossible so from that sense this is illusionistic.

To enforce the idea of mutual merge between the cubes and massive glass I have painted the breaking of the light. This is purely speculative. I have carried out no scientific study to find out if the light in the cubes would be broken this way.

The colors here are neon acrylic but used in a more “subtle” way.