Carnovsky's Red-Green-Blue Landscapes Provide Psychedelic Eye Candy At Milan Design Week

There's more than meets the eye in these multicolored murals by Milan-based design duo Carnovsky, Francesco Rugi and Silvia Quintanilla. Their newest collection of work RGB Fabulous Landscapes exhibited as part of Milan Design Week, which wrapped up this past weekend. The images are made up of three layers of primary colors. Under normal light, all the layers are visible one on top of the other—it's a bit confusing to the eye. But as the light in the room is filtered, one layer is isolated and its image clearly revealed. If you're still a bit befuddled, this GIF made up of the layers from Landscape n.1 should clear things up—you can see a lush green forest, an architectural arcade, a mass of bodies in what looks to be a Roman battle scene, and all three of them on top of each other.

Landscape n.1 Carnovsky's new collection focuses all on landscapes. Atmosphere n.1, below, shows a changing panoramic sky. But the duo have applied the same technique to other subjects in the past. We wrote about their murals of encyclopaedic-like drawings of animals and skeletons last year.

Atmosphereic n.1

There's a mix of old and new in Carnovsky's work. The subject's themselves reference Enlightenment era illustrations and Romantic landscape paintings. And separating red, green, and blue light is by no means a new phenomenon—it's the premise behind 3D glasses with one red and one blue lens, and the early color photographs taken in Russia at the turn of the century made through the process of digichromatography. But there's a lot of innovative technologies at work in Carnovosky's murals. They use RGB LED lights to illuminate the space. And, the works are printed with a new digital fresco technique realized by the Italian company graphicreport. To mix metaphors, the result of all this is a layercake of psychedelic eyecandy.

Atmospheric n.1

[via designboom] @whitneymallett