---
title: "Felice Varini builds an image from one point. Then he asks you to move"
locale: "en"
url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/varini-one-point-construction-en"
markdown_url: "https://irz.fr/en/articles/varini-one-point-construction-en.md"
category: "creative"
tags: ["Felice Varini", "anamorphosis", "painting", "architecture", "perspective", "projection", "site-specific art"]
published_at: "2026-08-23T16:12:00.000Z"
author: "Clara Besson"
translation: "https://irz.fr/fr/articles/varini-one-point-construction-fr.md"
---

# Felice Varini builds an image from one point. Then he asks you to move

Felice Varini's perfect circle is not painted on one wall but distributed across a room. A projector turns a chosen viewpoint into a construction plan.

A Felice Varini circle can cross a wall, beam, ceiling and window edge without ever existing on a single physical plane.

Stand in one precise place, however, and all those pieces join. The circle becomes clean. Take a step sideways and it breaks apart: an arc climbs a column, another stretches across the ceiling, a strip vanishes behind an opening.

The position where the figure comes together is not discovered after the painting. **It is part of the manufacturing method.**[1](https://varini.org/a-propos-de-felice-varini/)[2](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352797)

Varini first walks through the site, taking in its architecture, materials, history and function, and then chooses a viewpoint. He usually places it around eye height and, when the building allows it, along a route visitors are likely to use: a landing, an aperture between rooms, a line of movement.[1](https://varini.org/a-propos-de-felice-varini/)

From there, a projector can perform the task that once required pages of descriptive geometry, sending a flat shape onto every visible surface. The distorted pieces of light become the full-scale pattern for the paint.[2](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352797)

The famous optical effect is therefore the last stage of a fairly practical construction problem.

## The point

Varini describes the chosen position as a **reading point**.[1](https://varini.org/a-propos-de-felice-varini/)

It need not sit in the middle of a room or on the building's most symmetrical axis; the painter even says the choice can be arbitrary. He is looking for a position from which the relation between shape and space becomes interesting, while often taking the visitor's likely path into account.[1](https://varini.org/a-propos-de-felice-varini/)

Once chosen, that point fixes the geometry of everything that follows.

Imagine a circle that should appear round from there. A section falling on a nearby wall can stay relatively compact, while a section projected onto a distant surface has to grow in order to occupy the same angle in the viewer's field. If a beam interrupts the ray, the beam receives its own fragment. If the projection passes through a doorway, the wall behind it gets the continuation.

> **One drawing, three depths**
> Diagram showing one viewpoint projecting a form across three surfaces at different depths.
> - Viewpoint
> - near
> - middle
> - far
> The farther a surface sits from the projection point, the larger its painted fragment must become to occupy the same part of the image from that viewpoint.

The painted form is not a circle arbitrarily chopped up and pasted around a building. Every piece is **the local trace of the same projection cone**.

## Projection

Tommaso Empler's 2017 paper describes the contemporary construction of this kind of spatial anamorphosis with a bright projector.[2](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352797)

The projector occupies the projection point and throws a monochrome image onto the architecture. Light rays strike the relevant walls, columns, floors and ceilings directly. Instead of constructing a geometric grid by hand, the team receives a full-scale distorted contour on each surface.[2](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352797)

Those contours can be marked with tape, brushes or markers before the separate areas are filled with paint.[2](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352797)

> **The build**
> - Fix the viewpoint after reading the architecture and likely path through it.: Choose
> - Put the projector at that point and throw the shape onto the actual surfaces.: Project
> - Mark the distorted contours across walls, beams, floors or ceilings.: Transfer
> - Fill every fragment without altering the architecture underneath it.: Paint
> Process described by Felice Varini and Tommaso Empler.

Turning light into paint is what allows the work to look heavily calculated without forcing a painter to solve every intersection between shape and building on paper. The projection materializes the calculation at full scale.

It also explains the enormous distortions found when you walk up to a wall. A piece that occupied a small part of the apparent circle from the reading point can become a stripe several metres long when the receiving surface is distant or sharply angled.

At that stage precision depends on ordinary site work: projector stability, a visible outline, physical access to the surface, clean masking and faithful transfer. The geometry may be unusual; the last operation is still painting a building.

## Breaking apart

It is tempting to call the designated viewpoint correct and every other position a failed version of the image.

Varini does not describe the work that way.

He says the painted form achieves coherence at the chosen point, but when the spectator leaves it the work **meets the space** and generates an infinity of other viewpoints.[1](https://varini.org/a-propos-de-felice-varini/) The reconstructed circle is an entry into the work, not its only valid state.

Bernard Fibicher describes the tension from another angle. At the ideal position depth seems to collapse and separate pieces become one figure; once the viewer moves, architecture returns and the fragments can no longer be reduced to that imaginary plane.[3](https://varini.org/textes/bernard-fibicher-common-places-and-particular-perspectives-en/)

> **Two readings**
> - Fragments overlap visually and the geometric shape becomes immediately legible.: At the point
> - The form breaks apart while distance, angle, openings and materials regain their presence.: In motion
> - No. Varini describes many viewpoints generated by the painting meeting the space.: Wrong?
> - The viewer physically discovers how position constructs the image being seen.: Effect
> The viewpoint begins the reading; it does not exhaust the work.

This second half is easy to lose in a photograph. An image taken from the perfect point turns the installation into a magic trick: immaculate circle, impossible architecture, end of story.

Inside the building, the sequence runs differently. Visitors encounter scattered stripes, may find the place where they assemble, and lose it again as they keep walking. Perspective stops being only a representational technique; it becomes an event triggered by the moving body.

## Real surfaces

Varini is equally explicit about what he **does not do** to the architecture: he does not erase or correct reality to make the image easier.[1](https://varini.org/a-propos-de-felice-varini/)

The existing site remains present with its angles, windows, materials and awkward details. His painting has to work with that actual situation, here and now.[1](https://varini.org/a-propos-de-felice-varini/)

That separates the installation from an illusion built entirely as scenery. If a wall sticks out, the shape crosses the wall. If a doorway cuts through the circle, paint can continue behind it. A column is not something to remove in post-production; it becomes another receiving surface in the projection system.

The work is consequently very flat and very architectural at the same time. From the chosen point, it tries to collapse several depths into one figure. A few metres away it does the opposite, making it painfully obvious that these painted pieces do not share a plane.

## After the image

Varini's method can be summarized with projection geometry, but the construction process explains why it remains so effective.

Choose a point. Project a shape. Light distributes the drawing over the architecture. The contours are transferred and painted. Then the projector disappears, leaving apparently nonsensical fragments which can become one figure again when a viewer places an eye close to the original position.

The impossible image turns out to be unusually literal: it shows exactly what one point sees across several surfaces at once.

Varini then makes a useful move with that precision. As soon as the spectator has understood the mechanism, walking through the room makes them lose it again.

## References

1. [Felice Varini, About — viewpoint and architectural space](https://varini.org/a-propos-de-felice-varini/)
2. [Tommaso Empler, Anamorphosis and Contemporaneity, The Design Journal, 2017](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/14606925.2017.1352797)
3. [Bernard Fibicher, Common Places and Particular Perspectives — Felice Varini](https://varini.org/textes/bernard-fibicher-common-places-and-particular-perspectives-en/)