Vivid Paintings That Shape-Shift as You Walk by Them




Artist Rafaël Rozendaal is best known for his colorful, abstract website artworks. For a series of new images, however, he makes use of an old-school technology best known for its use in baseball cards.


Remember those funky, ridged cards where it looked like the slugger was swinging a bat when you turned the card slightly to and fro? That’s lenticular animation. It’s what our grandparents had instead of animated GIFs. But Rozendaal thinks of it as a modern medium. “A lenticular painting is like a very specialized single purpose computer,” he says. “As you stand in front of it, it is computing an equation. The algorithm consists of the four frames, the possible outcomes are infinite. It’s a computer that does not need electricity to run.”


Each of these paintings starts like a piece of software. Rozendaal defines the shapes and colors that make up the composition and scripts their transition. Four key frame images are selected and specialized software slices them into strips just a few pixels thick and interlaces them. This images is printed on a special sheet of plastic with ridges that act like lenses, exposing each of the four images sequentially, and creating the animating effect.


Rozendaal is an accomplished young artist whose work has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the prestigious Venice Biennial. He’s lectured at Yale and the École beaux-arts. And aside from these protean “paintings,” his oeuvre exists almost entirely online.



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