The deceived brain

Optical Illusions

O.Ocampo, Forever Always, 1989

Yes, our eyes deceive our brain. Each one of them sends independently information of what they perceive to our brain, who tries to interpret it all, turning to past experiences, associating them and comparing them. When it doesn’t find a similar image to what is being perceived that could explain it, brain fills the gap as good as possible. And this is how optical illusions trick our brain.

Vasarely, Boo, 1978

Perspective is one of them, only thing is we got used to it after so many centuries and now it’s just part of our ways to see things. Anamorphosis, of which we talked about not long ago, is also an optical illusion, which tricks us playing with the vanishing point.

Verbeek, Muffaroo or The Old Man, 1903

There are many types and they all use ambiguity, deformation and visual paradoxes. They turn to elements like color, value, proportion, relation fullness-emptiness, the image’s context or the viewer’s cultural knowledge.

My wife and my mother-in-law, 1915

Most of them are result of psychologist’s researches, who study how we perceive our surroundings: Kanisza, Delboeuf, Jastrow, between others.  Those that use color contrast are usually used to detect sight anomalies, like daltonism. You sure have already seen some of them: most famous one is Rubin’s Cup (1915), which plays with ambiguity of both shapes, using the contrast between the fullness and the emptiness. Octavio Ocampo, a Mexican painter that works on this topic, has this painting based on the famous cup. This is another one you sure have seen, which was first shown in Puck magazine in November 1915.

(Lonja de la Seda, Valencia.
Image: C. del Rosso)

In art, these effects are known for millenniums: think of Parthenon’s columns for example, which are only seen straight from the distance. Or just remember the geometrical games in Roman or Arabic tiling. 

Picasso, The monkey and her baby, 1951

As you can see, it’s not something exclusively found in painting: just look at this sculpture by Picasso! (The head is a car!)

Mantegna, St. Sebastian (fragment), 1459

Optical illusions were also sometimes used to hide a message or just used as a game to show the artist’s abilities and wit. Mantegna included hidden shapes among his clouds just for fun. 

Arcimboldo based his whole career in these compositions as loyal representative of Manierism: his paintings always had two ways of being look at; the surprise factor lies beneath the contemplation of the whole or in parts.

Arcimboldo, The Gardener or Vegetables in a bowl, 1590
(Left, the original painting)

Hogarth, False perspective, 1754

Hogarth combined in this engraving inverted perspectives with senseless proportions.

Dalí, The great paranoiac, 1936

Dalí works with the image’s context and turns to our previous knowledge to deceive us.

Gilbert, All is vanity, 1851

One incredible example is this creation of the American illustrator Gilbert: “All is Vanity”. He was 18 years old by when he did it, it’s a modern example of the topic “vanitas”. Or Verbeek’s comic The Upside Downs, in which the 6 vignettes can be read in two different ways: when turning it upside down, the shapes would change and comic would have a different plot.

If we are working on an optical illusion involving color, and its value gradients, combined with geometrical shapes, we obtain an image with virtual movement. This is based on the 60’s Op-art movement.

The clearest representative of visual paradoxes is undoubtedly M.C. Escher. Dominating sketching and spacing perfectly, he uses perspective to break it completely and put it incredibly back together. He imagines objects and constructions impossible to reproduce: they only exist in his mind and on the paper.

Escher, Relativity, 1953

Ditzinger, Th. Illusionen des Sehens.  Heidelberg, Spektrum V., 2006

Picon, D. Optische Täuschungen. Köln, Fleurus V. 2004

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