Octavio Ocampo's Metamorphic Paintings: How His Illusions Work

Octavio Ocampo's Metamorphic Paintings and Optical Illusions

Octavio Ocampo is a Mexican painter, born in 1943, known for what he calls a "metamorphic" style: realistic scenes made of smaller figures, animals and objects that, seen from a step back, also form a larger face or image. Both readings are there at once, and the fun lies in watching one turn into the other.

His paintings have been reproduced endlessly as posters and as optical-illusion puzzles online, usually without his name. This gallery brings together ten of them, with a note on what to look for in each, a short account of his life, and an explanation of why the brain flips between the two pictures. If you only have a minute, look at each image first from a distance, then up close, and notice which picture your eyes settle on first.

Who is Octavio Ocampo?

Ocampo was born on 28 February 1943 in Celaya, in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, and grew up in a family of designers and craftspeople. As a young art student he made papier-mâché figures for altars, carnival floats and festivals, and in high school he painted murals for his school and for Celaya's city hall.

Two influential women, Ruth Rivera, the daughter of muralist Diego Rivera, and the writer María Luisa Mendoza, encouraged him to study at the painting and sculpture school of Mexico's National Fine Arts Institute. He later went to the San Francisco Art Institute, where he also studied acting and dance and spent several years working in film and theatre. In 1976 he decided to devote himself entirely to painting and sculpture.

Commissions followed. In February 1979 Mexico's president, José López Portillo, gave US president Jimmy Carter a portrait painted by Ocampo. He has also made works for Jane Fonda and the labour leader César Chávez, and painted cover art for Cher's 1989 album Heart of Stone, which was later replaced by a conventional photograph. Several Mexican collections hold his work, and Visions Fine Art in Sedona, Arizona, represents him in the United States. A documentary, Octavio, directed by José Antonio Torres, explores his influences and method.

How a metamorphic painting works

Each painting is built on two levels. Up close you see complete little scenes: a couple, a rider, a dog, a windmill. From farther away, the edges of those scenes line up to become the contours of something larger, often a face. A hat brim turns into an eyebrow, a horse's neck into a jaw, a river into a mane of hair.

Psychologists describe this as an ambiguous or bistable image. Our visual system is constantly grouping shapes into the most likely object, and when two interpretations fit equally well, perception flips between them. Faces are especially powerful, because the brain has dedicated areas for spotting them, which is why we see faces in clouds and electrical sockets. Ocampo uses that habit deliberately.

Neither reading cancels the other. Once you have found the large face, the small figures do not disappear; they simply take on a second job. The pleasure is in tracing how each part keeps its own identity while working inside the bigger picture.

The idea has a long history. In the 1500s Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted heads made of fruit, vegetables and books, and Salvador Dalí played with double images in the twentieth century. Ocampo's contribution is warmth: his hidden figures are usually lovers, families, travellers and saints, and his themes often come from Mexican life and religion.

Couples and the passing of time

Forever Always

The painting at the top of this page, Forever Always, is Ocampo's most famous. Two elderly faces gaze at each other across a glowing vase. Look again and each face is made of a younger person: a woman seated on the left and a man playing a guitar on the right, a serenade in a whitewashed courtyard. The vase in the middle is a nod to the classic "Rubin vase" illusion, where two profiles and a vase share the same outline. The message is simple and tender: the old couple still carry the young lovers inside them.

A tree on the sea's edge

A twisted tree rises from a rock by the ocean. Its trunk curves inward from both sides to form two profiles leaning towards a kiss, while two more faces rest in the rock at its base. This seascape appears to be the one listed in Ocampo's catalogue as Kiss of the Sea.

Here is the same painting again. Try looking at it with your eyes half closed: the details of bark and waves fade, and the two faces in the trunk become much clearer. Squinting is a handy trick for all of his double images.

Faces built from Mexican village life

An old man under the arch

Through a stone archway, a huge bald head with a white beard looks out. Close up, his eye and nose are an old man in a straw sombrero leaning on a stick, and his ruffled collar is a young mother in a rebozo and a full orange skirt, holding her baby. A sheaf of dry grass forms his hair and beard, and a sleeping dog lies on the cobbles in front. Youth and old age, again, share the same frame.

The rider and the white horse

In this painting, signed with the artist's name in the lower corner, the face of an old man is formed by a rider in a broad hat standing beside a white horse. The horse's head and chest make the jaw and beard, while a winding white river supplies the long hair. A sleeping animal in the foreground fills in the shoulder.

Don Quixote, again and again

Cervantes's knight, who mistook windmills for giants, is a perfect subject for a painter of double vision, and Ocampo returned to him several times.

Knight, squire and windmill

Don Quixote rides towards us with his lance, and Sancho Panza sits beside him. Their heads become the eyes of a much larger face, the lance becomes a moustache and the domed windmill behind them becomes a forehead under a hat. More faces hide in the clouds and the dark earth at the sides, as if the landscape itself were dreaming.

Visions of Quixote

In Visions of Quixote, probably his best-known take on the story, the giant head is made of the knight and his squire in plumed hats, with the horse Rocinante forming the side of the face and a cloth bundle the top of the head. A windmill, a skull in the field and a woman carrying water fill the background. Look at the shield on the ground: it holds a tiny Rubin vase of its own.

Icons, myths and the sacred

Mona Lisa

Ocampo's take on Leonardo's portrait swaps parts of the sitter for animals. A ginger cat sits where her neckline should be, a rabbit forms her folded hands, and one cheek shades into whiskered fur. In the famous hazy landscape behind her, look for an animal head on the right and a face hidden in the clouds.

A golden head in the stars

Against a starry sky, a golden face in profile seems to fly, its hair turned into wings. A hand below lifts a small glowing planet. The painting reads as a celestial messenger, and the two forms, head and hand, echo each other across the dark space.

Shiva

This painting builds the face of the Hindu god Shiva from his family and his symbols. The elephant-headed Ganesha forms one eye and the trunk-shaped side of the nose, the goddess Parvati forms the other eye, and the river goddess Ganga flows from the top of his head as twin fountains. The bull Nandi, the trident, the small drum and the crescent moon complete the picture, set against Himalayan peaks.

Bodies in the rocks

At first this is a cove with a waterfall and shells on the shore. Then the rocks reveal themselves as human bodies curled together, and the largest boulder becomes the bearded face of an old sea god. On the left, a bare branch sketches the delicate outline of a woman's face. It is one of his most crowded and dreamlike scenes.

How to look at Ocampo's work

Change your distance. Step back from the screen or zoom out to see the large image, then zoom in for the small scenes.
Squint. Blurring your vision removes detail and lets the big shapes appear.
Start with the eyes. In most of his faces, the eyes are a person or an animal. Find them and the rest falls into place.
Look for the story. The hidden figures are rarely random; they usually say something about the large face, such as the memories it holds or the life it has lived.

Children often find the hidden figures faster than adults, perhaps because they are less sure in advance what they are meant to see. That openness is exactly what Ocampo's paintings ask of all of us.

Sources: Wikipedia: Octavio Ocampo; Visions Fine Art, Octavio Ocampo gallery; all paintings © Octavio Ocampo; images first gathered by Learning Mind.

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