At first glance, they are nearly believable, these angled buildings with their curious corners. Closer inspection reveals Escher-esque optical illusions and impossible intersections, liminal hybrids of real details … reconstructed.
Olivier Ratsi, a French visual artist, titles this series What You See is Not What You Get (WYSI*not*WYG). It collects then fragments urban landscapes, which he dubbs Anarchitecture, sorted by country and city, from around the world. The results are reassembled into something at once more disjointed yet (together) unified than the original constituent objects.
His final pieces are then printed and posted around towns and cities where one might normally find advertisements – a sort of subvertising campaign challenging people to stop, look and think about their urban environment.
