Illusion of movement, colour games, perspective deceptions, deforming mirrors, optical effects…
Like a rollercoaster, this exhibition, which combines painting, sculpture, photography, science and technology, will take you up and down, back and forth in time, between the Middle Ages and the present day, Picasso and the Lumière brothers, Kandinskji and Balla, Man Ray and Klee and Boccioni and Duchamp, to discover the many fascinating tricks, artifices, stratagems and sleight of hand with which man has managed to deceive the eyes.
A kaleidoscopic journey on the border between art and science, in a city, Padua, in which these two worlds have always intertwined, from Galileo to the school of the psychology of perception and the birth of Gruppo N, a Paduan artistic-cultural collective at the forefront of optic-kinetic art to which the monograph that concludes an exhibition that, in this way, joins the celebrations for the 800th anniversary of the University of Padua is dedicated.
The estrangement, hallucinations, and vertigo provoked by many of the works on display may lead the spectator to ask himself a similar question when visiting an exhibition such as The Eye at Play: deliberately conceived from an international perspective, in fact, the exhibition explores artistic research and the many ways in which, from the Middle Ages to the present day, the sense of sight has been tricked, deceived, and deluded.