The art of the contemporary Spanish self-taught artist Sergi Cadenas is incredibly unique. He is a very talented master of artistic metal forging and at the same time an original painter who has revealed to the world a new amazing form of visual art.
Experimenting with creating three-dimensional illusions on corrugated canvas, Sergi uses his own painting technique and creates unique portraits where he brings together often two opposing images: a young girl and an older woman, a black man and a bright blonde, a beast and a man.
The 47-year-old self-taught Catalan artist Sergi Cadenas, a blacksmith by profession and artist by vocation, has conquered the world with his incredible 3-D portraits. Looking at his work, it is truly amazing what incredible results a person can achieve if he does what he loves.
His portraits seem to be impregnated with magic. On one picture plane with ordinary paints the master manages to place two diametrically opposed images. And which of them the viewer sees depends on which side of the picture he is looking at. Moving to the opposite side, his gaze is completely different. It all depends on the perspective.
Cadenas’ paintings are made up of vertical stripes, which is what makes these magical transformations happen. And depending on what angle you look at, the image changes. An adult person turns into a child, a cat into a girl, a skeleton into a person, a young girl into an old woman, Marilyn Monroe into Albert Einstein
At first glance – the secret is quite simple to perceive, but it is incredibly difficult to create: the artist with meticulous precision and honed skill draws two different portraits in pencil, and then in oil on parallel vertical strips of corrugated canvas, and in such a way that the images are passive in statics, and the visible image is transformed as the viewer looks at the picture from what angle.
It is very difficult to explain in words, so we suggest you start by watching a short video to really understand what the art of Sergi Cadenas is all about.