Paris-Tokyo #4 1980

Victor Vasarely made this, Paris-Tokyo #4, with paint to build a cube out of optical illusion. It’s so cool how he coaxes depth from a flat surface, right? I can imagine Vasarely carefully plotting each circle, shifting their size and color just so. The paint looks smooth, precise—like he wanted to trick our eyes into seeing something that isn't really there. I wonder if he felt like he was building something real while he was making it? I can imagine that maybe he thought he was an architect of new dimensions. The way the colors shift—gray to red to green—it’s like he’s tuning into some kind of universal visual language. I see echoes of Bauhaus and the early experiments with abstraction, yet Vasarely takes it somewhere else entirely. His work reminds us that painting isn't just about what you see, but how you see. It’s an invitation to play with perception, to question what's real and what's not.