Intercultural Geometries

Reflections on Illusion and Culture

By Luc Sokolowski 

On this occasion of Intercultural Geometries, a pop-up exhibition to benefit the Hispanic theater and arts organization, Teatro Loft, on November 15, 2025, I would like to present a few thoughts about illusion, and optical illusion in particular, as they pertain to the paintings in the show. But first, let me offer some cultural context.

Intercultural Geometries is a fitting title for this exhibition of work by two geometric artists, Chesco Hernandez, a Venezuelan-American living in Pearland, Texas, and myself, Luc Sokolowski, a French-American resident of Katy, Texas with Polish ancestry. Although Chesco and I have different cultural backgrounds, we have formed a friendship because of our shared love of hard-edge abstract painting. Indeed, geometric abstraction has long been considered a nearly universal and perennial visual language, and so may be the basis for integration between cultures in our increasingly global society. Some of the earliest examples of human-made art are geometric in form. Stripes, dots, and other shapes decorate Paleolithic archeological sites around the planet. Anthropologists theorize that this early cross-cultural innovation must have been socially useful as a kind of proto-writing.

Since these widespread prehistoric discoveries of the expressive capabilities of abstract shapes and lines, geometry has been a passion of artists for millennia. For example, Greek patterns and Islamic tessellations are evidence of the advanced thinking of an ancient world that is often caricatured as scientifically ignorant and technologically undeveloped. But it is in the modern age that diverse explorations into the possibilities of geometric abstraction began to be carried out at an unprecedented rate in many different countries, from Asia to Europe, as well as the Americas. Some of these relatively recent investigations into geometric abstraction sought to make direct, purely non-objective paintings. Others, however, delved into the phenomenon of optical illusion, and that is the artistic tradition that Chesco and I are interested in exploring further.

Optical illusion is a necessary component in both of our projects, but for different reasons. In Chesco’s abstract paintings, bands of colors play off each other to create a sense of movement across the picture plane, while in my geometric pictures, flat areas of color blend together to imply space or depth. For Chesco’s work, color vibrations between colored stripes make the surface of his paintings shimmer and undulate in a kinetic way. And occasionally the horizontal lines that intersect these stripes appear to shift diagonally in a ‘café wall’ effect, which accentuates the dynamic and challenging quality of Chesco’s project. As for my work, there are moments where lines in a grid will optically bend or curve unexpectedly because of the way they intersect each other, reminding the viewer that visual elements, due to the way our eyes and brains interpret them, are more like living organisms than dead, static material. Most of all, in my paintings, optical effects of light, shadow, and transparency flow in and out of each other, unifying an otherwise fragmentary picture plane.

Looking back at the history of art, it seems to me that movement and pictorial depth were once deemed forbidden in abstract painting. Optical illusions of any kind except the least obtrusive, and the least avoidable, were considered impure. Because self-referential pictorial flatness was idolized as embodying the essence of the medium of painting, artworks with so-called ‘holes’ or ‘windows’ were denounced as either illusionistic in content or compositional failures. Eventually, optical effects became accepted, but were relegated to specialized art forms such as ‘Op Art’ or ‘Kinetic Art’. By giving optical illusion its own categories, it was limited, thereby instructing artists that it was only appropriate to work with it under certain circumstances and within particular technical styles. Many artists made great advances in the use of optical illusion under these strict conditions, but I think today creatives are breaking out of this mold. For I think it is clear now that optical illusion is not illusionism, and has nothing to do with representational art. Indeed, because one hardly sees it employed in figurative work, and because it can happen naturally when playing with flat shapes and lines, one could say that optical illusion is basically abstract. It should be no surprise, then, that to a greater and greater degree abstract artists are turning to optical illusion without feeling that they are being either referential or overly scientific.

It is interesting to the painter that we can have optical illusions without color, just in gray scale, but we cannot have color without optical illusions. The German-American artist and teacher, Josef Albers, makes the point in his influential book Interaction of Color that color is inherently deceptive. One can never see a color as it truly is because it always changes in relation to its surroundings. A color will look lighter next to a darker color, and darker next to a lighter color, so both colors are always mutually changing each other. This is the magic of simultaneous contrast. But maybe deceptive is a misleading term. It may be better to say that colors generate illusions because they are interrelated and interdependent. Some philosophers go further and say that illusion in general is not just a lie, but that it can have positive effects. This idea is corroborated by nature. Consider chameleons who blend into their environment to avoid predators. Or animals who mimic the sounds of other animals to defend their territory. Perhaps the meaning of life is so elusive to us because life in itself is illusive.

On that note, some philosophers also think that our language and concepts are illusory, unable to perfectly represent reality as it is but instead present to us a mere shadow or simulation that we accept as real. But all is not lost because these thinkers go on to say that although our words and ideas give us only the illusion of understanding, without them we would not have the courage to operate in the world. It is curious to note that colors, along with their illusions, can be seen not just as experiences, but also as concepts. The Austro-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s posthumously published book, Remarks on Colour, has had a profound effect on my thinking about color as a logical, or illogical, concept rather than just as a perceptual thing as, say, Josef Albers presents it. In this slim but radical work, Wittgenstein asks us to imagine colors that do not exist, simply based on the logic that we have come to expect from color. For example, what would something white but transparent, not opaque, look like? And the things we see through this medium, what color would they be? At first this does not seem like an odd question, until you actually start to think about it. This thought experiment relates to the kinds of experiments with optical transparency that I conduct in my paintings. In my work, the color red may appear transparent with the color green peaking through it, without the two colors mixing very much. Or a transparent strip may appear blue on one side and magenta on the other depending on what other colors they cross. I would like to think that these are the types of chromatically conceptual conundrums that Wittgenstein would have enjoyed.

The philosopher that most connects to Chesco’s art, in my view, is the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In his groundbreaking essay, Cezanne’s Doubt, Merleau-Ponty writes that, "The painter can do no more than construct an image; he must wait for this image to come to life for other people." I think this point is especially applicable to Chesco’s approach, not just to painting, but to the art world itself. Chesco is keenly interested in how viewers experience and respond to his work. Any artist who works with optical illusions is aware that their pictures do not have any independent existence apart from the viewer. The art is, fundamentally, a phenomenon. And Chesco is exceptional in his embrace of this insight. The energy in his work flows directly out of its relationship with its audience because the work draws insistingly on the power of one’s encounter with color. I think Chesco exemplifies Merleau-Ponty’s notion, expressed in another essay, Eye and Mind, that all visual art is primarily engaged with, well, the visual: “In whatever civilization it is born, from whatever beliefs, motives, or thoughts, no matter what ceremonies surround it—and even when it appears devoted to something else—from Lascaux to our time, pure or impure, figurative or not, painting celebrates no other enigma but that of visibility.”

This is no trivial tautology. The mere experience of vision, or of any sense for that matter, is indeed a mystery. We may understand the biology, chemistry, and physics of vision, but what philosophers call the qualia, that is, what it is like to see, hear, smell, taste, or touch, is still not understood, and may never be. This mystery of qualia leads us to the question of consciousness and back to illusion. Sensation is not possible without consciousness, and therefore neither is illusion possible without consciousness, since illusion requires sensation. Paradoxically, then, to be fooled is to be conscious, that is, intelligent in some way. But we should not be surprised that these philosophical reflections on art end in a cul-de-sac of contradiction. In the words of Merleau-Ponty later in Eye and Mind, “Essence and existence, imaginary and real, visible and invisible—painting scrambles all our categories, spreading out before us its oneiric universe of carnal essences, actualized resemblances, mute meanings.”

In other words, for Chesco and me as painters, illusion, and particularly color, is a reality unto itself, a surface universe that suggests a limitless expanse of possibilities and an infinite ocean of dreams. Illusion for us is not just a necessary evil, it can be a beautiful good. For instance, optical illusions can inspire introspection and make us humble and critical. But you do not have to decide whether you agree with this sentiment in order to enjoy Chesco’s work, or hopefully mine.

I would like to end with one last quote, this time from my favorite Latin American poet, the Chilean, Vicente Huidobro, who was friends with Cubist painters, and who, I think, has something relevant to contribute to these reflections on cultural integration and optical illusions, especially in these times of international social change. The following brief lines are from Canto I of his book-length masterpiece, Altazor:

Azotado de espinas y los ojos en cruz

La conciencia es amargura

La inteligencia es decepción

Solo en las afueras de la vida

Se puede plantar una pequeña ilusión

Thrashed with thorns and a cross of eyes

Conscience is sorrow 

Intelligence is deceit

Only on the outskirts of life

Can one plant a little illusion

(Translation by Eliot Weinberger, 1988.)