Angle‑shifting paintings trend
Spanish painter Sergi Cadenas posted a demo of an optical painting that ‘ages’ depending on the viewer’s angle, and the clip racked up 714,000 views and over 23,000 likes — a neat example of craft‑forward visual illusion going viral. It’s the sort of technique that turns a simple frame into a performance piece as viewers move around it. (x.com)
A painted face can look 25 on your left and 80 on your right, and Sergi Cadenas does it without a screen, a projector, or a digital filter. The Spanish artist builds ridged canvases so each side of each ridge holds a different slice of the image, and the portrait flips as you move past it. (artsy.net) That is why the clip spreading this week feels like a magic trick and a workshop demo at the same time. The image does not change by itself; your body changes it by changing the angle, so the frame behaves more like a stage prop than a flat picture. (youtube.com) Cadenas is not a new internet artist who appeared overnight from one viral post. He was born in Girona in 1972, he is self-taught, and Jordi Barnadas Gallery says he has been painting professionally since about age 30. (barnadas.com) His best-known works use portrait pairs with a built-in relationship. Artsy says he uses the shifting image to explore pairings like youth and mortality, emotional opposites, and racial difference, which is why the “aging” pieces land so fast even before you know the method. (artsy.net) The physical trick is surprisingly low-tech and brutally precise. Cadenas lays down thin vertical lines of painting paste across the canvas, lets them dry into narrow ridges, and then paints one portrait on one side of the ridges and a second portrait on the other side. (core77.com) Some descriptions put the count at nearly 200 ridges on a single work, which explains why the transition looks smooth instead of chunky. From one viewpoint your eye catches mostly one painted side, and from the opposite viewpoint it catches the other. (core77.com) That method is often compared with lenticular printing, the plastic postcard trick that makes one image flip into another when you tilt it. The difference is that Cadenas is doing the same basic optical handoff with oil paint on a hand-built surface instead of a factory-made plastic lens sheet. (artincontext.org) His gallery lists works with names like “Aging,” “Maria 1943-2023,” and “Marilyn/Einstein,” and those titles tell you the point of the illusion. He is not hiding a second image as an Easter egg; he is pairing two states of a person or two ideas in one body-sized object. (barnadas.com) Part of the appeal online is that the camera can only half-explain it. A phone video can show the switch, but the work is designed for a viewer who walks past it in real space, which is why clips of it keep resurfacing years after his portraits first went viral on Instagram and other platforms. (artsy.net) Cadenas also comes from a metalworking background, and Artsy ties that to the paintings’ construction. When your family trade involves shaping hard materials to exact dimensions, building a canvas that has to line up ridge by ridge starts to look less like a gimmick and more like workshop engineering. (artsy.net)
