Felice Varini

Paris-based Swiss artist Felice Varini uses King’s Cross as a canvas and intervenes onto the buildings, which populate the skyline north of Regent’s Canal.  With ‘Across the Buildings’, Varini takes to streets, façades and roofs in and around the Granary Square.   Geometric aluminum surfaces mould to the shapes of the Victorian brick and slate, cutting through their brown tonality.

From a single viewpoint, accessible from the top of an elevated platform, these geometries unify into one continuous pattern. As the metallic shapes join into one, they move into the foreground giving beholders the impression that they can, as Varini once did, ‘touch’ the buildings from where they are standing.

Drawing on the Western history of the Italian Renaissance paintings and on the more recent notions of the expanded field of art, Varini’s interventions place the embodied experience of the viewer at the heart of his practice. Finding the point of perspective, which is based on the height of the artist’s eyes, becomes a performance in itself. Onlookers move around the space as they search for the perfect alignment, sometimes tipping one another on where this point actually is.