Complex Perspectival Illusions: Giambattista Piranesi Vs Yong Kyun Shin

Italian artist Giovanni Battista or Giambattista Piranesi (1720–1778) is well known for his etchings of ancient Roman buildings and archaeological ruins.

A printmaker who considered himself an architect, Piranesi had trained in structural and hydraulic engineering and had a genuine passion for etching views of ancient Rome in which he added elements such as vases and altars that were absent in reality. 

In later years while the vedutisti such as Canaletto and Tiepolo were producing luminous etched views, Piranesi focused on a series of labyrinthine prison interiors, entitled Carceri d'invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), featuring huge vaults crisscrossed by flights of steps.

These visions distorted by his fantasy were characterised by disturbing atmospheres: Piranesi erected fantastically epic labyrinths and nightmarish architectures recreated through a process of accumulation and aggregation, with internal spaces full of stone arches, timbers, ropes, amazing structures and mysterious machines, complex optical illusions and a hallucinated sense of grandeur.

Thomas De Quincey in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1820) perfectly described the hallucinatory visions you get while looking at Piranesi’s works: “Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's Antiquities of Rome, Mr. Coleridge, who was standing by, described to me a set of plates by that artist ... which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever: some of them (I describe only from memory of Mr. Coleridge's account) representing vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood all sorts of engines and machinery, wheels, cables, pulleys, levers, catapults, etc., etc., expressive of enormous power put forth, and resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase; and upon it, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself: follow the stairs a little further, and you perceive it come to a sudden abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who had reached the extremity, except into the depths below. ... But raise your eyes, and behold a second flight of stairs still higher: on which again Piranesi is perceived, but this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Again elevate your eye, and a still more aerial flight of stairs is beheld: and again is poor Piranesi busy on his aspiring labors: and so on, until the unfinished stairs and Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the hall.”

The etcher's biographers claim he once stated: "I need to produce great ideas, and I believe that if I were commissioned to design a new universe, I would be mad enough to undertake it."

Yet in many ways Piranesi actually designed his own universe, a world full of architectural fantasies and complexes of buildings that could exist only in dreams and that reappeared later on in the work of Dutch graphic artist Maurits Cornelis Escher’s drawings, prints and illustrations, influenced by Roger Penrose’s mathematical puzzles and impossible figures such as the Penrose staircase and the tribar.

Piranesi’s admirers will be able to discover more about him at the event entitled The Arts of Giambattista Piranesi. Architect, etcher, antiquarian, vedutista, designer, opening on 28th August (and on until 21st November 2010) at the Exhibition Centre of the Giorgio Cini Foundation on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, in Venice, Italy.

The event, coinciding with the opening of the Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by architect Michele De Lucchi in collaboration with Adam Lowe and Factum Arte, Madrid, will feature 300 original prints, plus commissioned contemporary creations inspired by Piranesi’s designs and style and also a 3D simulation of the Carceri d’Invenzione.

Piranesi’s works and that emphasis on optical illusions recently came to my mind while looking at the "Extreme of Optical Effect" collection by young fashion designer and Central Saint Martins graduate Yong Kyun Shin.

The recipient of the Fashion Special Prize at the latest edition (the ninth) of the ITS  award, the Korean designer based his graduation collection on a sort of complex layering of spaces à la Piranesi.

Padding created ambiguous spatial illusions, hatched and fragmented elements formed unusual shapes and sculptural forms overlapped one on the other giving out impressions of movement and transitions.

The complex geometries and 3D elements in Yong Kyun Shin's designs often look like intricate architectural structures, rich experiences in the visualisation of optical illusions and spatial distortions characterised by the same mix of  technical and ephemeral, fear and attraction that prevailed in Piranesi's work.

Yet in this collection there is also a well balanced combination of amazing and ingenious fantasies that makes me think about what Piranesi wrote while commenting about the variety of decorations of elaborate chimney pieces in Diverse maniere di adornare camini (1769): "Mankind is too fond of variety to be always pleased with the same decorations. We are alternatively pleased with the gay and the serious, and even with the pathetic, even the horror of a battle has its beauty, and out of fear springs pleasure."

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