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The Gravity-Defying Architectural Paintings of Cinta Vidal

The painter and muralist bends physics with her eerily realistic paintings of buildings and the people in them.
Images courtesy the artist

It's not easy to look at a painting by Spanish artist Cinta Vidal, but the work is worth it. The directions of up and down are twisted and inverted like an MC Escher sketch, giving the eye a hard time knowing where to start looking. Each scene is rendered with architectural precision, drawing the eye to delve deeply into one corner of the work. When the time comes to connect these details to the rest of a scene, however, a viewer can be left head-scratching. Reconciling the physics of one of her scenes is like solving a puzzle with your eyes.

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Vidal has been illustrating professionally for eight years, developing her architecture-distorting style back in 2013. Today, she sells her work in prints ranging from 20–50cm2, but she previously years spent training as a scenographer for the theater from the Escola Massana in Barcelona, and an apprenticeship at Taller de Escenografia Castells Planas in St. Agnès de Malasanyes helped make Vidal's method ideal for street murals. "There I learned to work on a large scale," she tells The Creators Project. "Just half a year ago I started to paint my own murals, and I'm enjoying it a lot."

This week Vidal takes over a wall at POW! WOW! Long Beach, an offshoot of Jasper Wong's Pacific street art bacchanal, POW! WOW! Hawaii. There, she'll show her work alongside Pantone, DEFER, Selena Miles, Pantonio Sarah Joncas, HITOTZUKI Kashink, Aaron Li-Hill, Edwin Ushiro, and more. Check out more of her works below:

Collaboration with Uriginal in Barcelona

See more of Cinta Vidal's work on her website, and learn more about POW! WOW! Long Beach here.

Related:

An Artist is Turning MC Escher's 'Relativity' Into a Video Game

Honolulu's 'Graffitification' Problem Can't Stop the POW! WOW! Art Festival

Interdimensional Portals and Miniature Murals Invade Honolulu