This painting reveals something crazy about how our eyes work.

Patrick Hughes is a British artist responsible for the work “Superduperperspective”, which is on display at the Birmingham art gallery in England. The painting, an optical illusion, is gaining prominence for forcing your eye to see depth in a 2D image.

If you look at the board in front, you will see only three common corridors. But when the viewer moves left or right, they see the magic happen!

via GIPHY

via GIPHY

In the world of optical illusion, this kind of phenomenon is known as “reverspective, ” a term coined by Hughes to refer to an object that seems far away, but is actually in the foreground. Another example of this type of work is the “Illusion Dragon”, in which the animal's gaze follows the viewer around the room, following its movements.

The magic of reverspective is that this kind of work forces your eye to see a perspective that isn't there. When the angular lines converge on a vanishing point, we realize the depth. Hughes works with the shapes and sizes of flat images, making certain things look farther than others.