EVOL Confusion Mural Paris 2009

As your eye drifts right across this image, a strange sense of vertigo arises as a dull, familiar and repetitive gray concrete-and-glass facade gives way to a mind-blowing montage of eccentric proportions – an information overload that short-circuits our built-in mental pattern recognition software (and just imagine it at full size).

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EVOL Confusion mural detail

No, you have not gone insane … though you might if you look too long at this giant 10-by-40-foot wall mural by street artist EVOL, part of an art exhibition in Paris. The little potted plants in front of the ‘building’ give you some sense of scale, but not much.

EVOL Confusion mural illusion

The combination of rough-textured surface materials, spilled gray paint and clipped window photographs make this piece convincing even up close – except for the odd outlet sticking through here or there … or most notably: the giant crunch-point created where an existing steel ceiling beam seems to have dropped in through the roof.

EVOL Garden of Edena mural

The artist achieved a similar optical illusion effect with “The Garden of Edena pt. 1,” a mural under a fig tree in Lagos, Portugal.

“Such a special place to spend time. In the deep courtyard of a former prison in Lagos, this fig tree takes over all the space in the back,” EVOL writes. “When you ‘dive into’ its leafs it is like entering a parallel universe – like a green shelter protecting you from the blasting sun and the construction noises around.”

EVOL Garden of Edena detail

“Despite that every day we had to collect some hundreds of overripe sticky figs from the ground, it wasn’t only awesome to work there, but also to escape the heat and just sit and stare … at the sun freckles that the wind lets in, the birds, bumblebees and ants doing their thing, even at night, when the moon-ish lights come on and snails, spiders and all other kind of weird creatures take over.”

Check out more creative mini cities by EVOL.