Float

Float takes its cue from trompe l’oeil, where a flat surface is persuaded to suggest something beyond itself. Painted architecture, false recesses and imaginary mouldings have played with this idea for centuries, using little more than colour and perspective to create convincing depth.

There is something wonderfully contradictory about the tradition. Everyone knows the wall is flat, yet the illusion remains pleasurable. Its success does not depend on deception so much as our willingness to participate.

Float reduces that idea to its essentials. The elaborate perspective and painterly shadows of the fresco disappear, leaving colour to suggest projection and recession. What remains is almost a diagram of depth, a simplified graphic interpretation of a much older decorative technique.

This reduction changes the character of the illusion. Float never tries to convince us that the surface has genuinely acquired another dimension. Instead, it allows the eye to move between flat pattern and implied volume. One moment the geometry appears to project forward; the next it settles back into the grid.

Trompe l’oeil has always enjoyed testing the boundary between what we see and what we know. Float continues that game with considerably fewer ingredients, proving that even a small shift in colour can make a flat surface refuse to behave entirely flat.

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