The Cancellation of Perspective: A Deliberate Break with Depth
In the history of Western painting, linear perspective long stood as the primary tool for organizing visual space according to a rational model. Since Brunelleschi and Alberti, the painting was conceived as a window opened onto the world, centered around one or more vanishing points whose function was to simulate three-dimensional depth. This system, inherited from the Renaissance, was further developed by artists like Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, and Andrea Mantegna, before becoming an academic standard.
‘Annulamento prospettico’— or the cancellation of perspective — refers to the deliberate rejection of these conventions. It is not a technical failure but a critical gesture: a way of flattening space, neutralizing depth, abolishing visual hierarchies in order to reaffirm the surface as a field of action. This reversal does not correspond to a particular style. It runs through early Cubist experiments by Picasso and Braque — where the multiplication of viewpoints dismantles spatial coherence — as well as Russian Constructivism in the work of Lissitzky, the radical purity of Kazimir Malevich, the grid-like canvases of Agnes Martin, or the frontal strategies of Josef Albers.
In contemporary art, this strategy becomes a conceptual issue in its own right. It no longer questions what space to represent, but rather the very conditions of representation. The image ceases to be an illusion: it becomes structure. The cancellation of perspective is thus used to shift focus from the depicted subject to the language of painting itself. This shift turns painting into a field of experimentation, where seeing becomes a way of thinking.
Abstract art, in particular, has offered fertile ground for this shift. The canvas ceases to be a space to traverse and becomes a surface to inhabit. But it is important to note that the cancellation of perspective is not inherent to all abstraction. Some abstract painters retain effects of spatial depth: one thinks of the translucent layers of Mark Rothko, the stratified masses of Nicolas de Staël, or the optical floats of Olga Rozanova. Others, by contrast, assert the radical frontality of the surface — Piet Mondrian with his orthogonal compositions, Ad Reinhardt with his nearly invisible monochromes, or Barnett Newman with his vertical zips.
In all cases, this refusal of depth is never an end in itself. It is a strategic choice — one that expresses a way of thinking about image-making. Space is no longer simulated: it is reconstructed. And it is within this tension — between the heritage of perspective and the assertion of flatness — that a crucial part of modern pictorial practice unfolds.
A Formal Choice, Not a Mere Consequence of Abstraction
In the work of René Mayer, the cancellation of perspective is neither an automatic consequence of abstraction nor a mere formal trait. It results from a deliberate choice — a visual and intellectual decision that underlies his entire practice. Though his works contain no realistic figuration, they could, like those of many abstract painters, have introduced spatial cues: effects of depth, scale gradients, diagonal tensions. But this is never the case. There is no horizon, no center, no vanishing point. Space is not suggested — it is denied. Everything happens within the plane, on the plane, through the plane.
This structural refusal gives his work a unique perceptual coherence. The pictorial surface is not treated as a mere support — it becomes the very site of action. In this sense, the cancellation of perspective functions as a critical tool, forbidding any illusionistic reading and recentering the gaze on internal relationships between forms. What René Mayer constructs is not an image but a field of visual tensions.
In his paintings, geometric elements — squares, circles, grids, layers, linear punctuations — coexist without ever organizing themselves into optical depth. They intersect, overlap, interrupt one another, but always remain equidistant from the viewer’s eye. The viewer is not invited to enter the image but to navigate across its surface. This frontal, intentional, and rigorous position enacts a different vision of the world — not one defined by a fixed, sovereign point of view, but by a dynamic equilibrium among visible forces. In this way, René Mayer’s work moves beyond mere abstraction: it questions the very possibility of a focused gaze.
“Boxes” – The Picture Plane as Both Prison and Escape Route
The “Boxes” series offers a paradigmatic example of how René Mayer approaches the cancellation of perspective. At first glance, some of the paintings may suggest an organized space, a stable spatial order, almost architectural. Grids, alignments, and recurring geometric forms briefly create the illusion of structure. But this impression quickly dissolves. No clues allow for a coherent reading of depth. There is no ground plane, no horizon, no vanishing point, no trace of perspective. Everything unfolds in absolute frontality. The forms, though orderly, follow no system of projection. They coexist on the same surface, without spatial hierarchy, in a space that never seeks to simulate dimensional reality.
This deliberate flatness is far from neutral. It reflects a precise visual and symbolic strategy. In this series, the square — a central, recurring form — is never merely decorative. It evokes, simultaneously, the cell, the box, the imposed frame, protection, and confinement. This visual ambivalence echoes an ethical tension: are we enclosed in order to be protected, or protected at the cost of being enclosed? By refusing to place these figures in any depth, René Mayer radicalizes the viewer’s position. There is no safe background to retreat into — only the surface, which forces a critical reading of what is seen.
This position echoes Michel Foucault’s analyses in ‘Discipline and Punish’ and other writings on structures of confinement. The square, in this view, can be read as a diagram of power — a site where the visible becomes a form of control. But where disciplinary systems attempt to mask their authority behind false transparency, René Mayer lays the structure bare. He doesn’t cloak it in the illusionism of perspective — he exposes its internal tensions.
This is where the cancellation of perspective takes on its full meaning. It is not merely a formal reduction. It functions as a critical gesture, a way to suspend spatial narration and redirect attention to the relationships between elements. By eliminating depth entirely, René Mayer cuts off the illusion of distance. The viewer is confronted with a surface saturated in graphic tensions: open or closed squares, crossing circles, sharp points, repetitive grids. Each of these motifs acts as a force in its own right. They are not symbols — they are visual dynamics.
Some critics have linked this strategy to that of Josef Albers in his ‘Homage to the Square’ series. There too, squares are repeated and overlapped without ever creating an illusion of depth. But in René Mayer’s case, the political dimension is more pronounced. Where Albers explores chromatic perception, René Mayer confronts form with implicit social tensions. The square is not merely a visual module: it becomes a figure of constraint, of imposed order, of normative framing.
The use of disruptive elements — broken grids, penetrating forms, erased edges — amplifies this tension. These interventions never act as ornament. They do not puncture an imaginary volume. Instead, they fracture the regularity of the surface, not to reveal a hidden depth, but to show that the surface itself is a site of conflict. What René Mayer stages is a space where forms collide, graze, and cross each other — yet never escape.
In this context, the cancellation of perspective is not an aesthetic device: it is a condition of possibility. It prevents the gaze from fleeing. It forces the viewer to confront the visual elements in their simultaneity, their co-presence, their irreducibility. This choice inscribes the work within a tradition of critical frontality — rooted in modernism but reconfigured here in a contemporary context. One might also reference the work of Daniel Buren, who uses repetition and flatness to neutralize depth and affirm the self-referential nature of the support.
But in René Mayer’s work, this self-referentiality never comes at the expense of meaning. The painting remains a space of inquiry. It questions our relationship to space, to norms, to visibility. The gaze, denied access to the image’s interior, is instead invited to measure its density. It is no longer about contemplating a scene — but confronting a situation. The surface becomes a mirror without depth — yet charged with intensity.
Thus, the “Boxes” series does not merely suspend perspective: it cancels it altogether, in order to give rise to a different relationship with the visible. A relationship in which what is shown refers to nothing outside itself, but acts here and now, in the silent frontality of a painting without escape.
“Moving Earth” – Flattening the World to Reveal Its Tensions
The “Moving Earth” series illustrates, through a different visual language, the same formal orientation found in René Mayer’s other pictorial series. Here again, the cancellation of perspective is a foundational compositional choice. But the surface is handled with an added layer: matter itself. René Mayer introduces crumpled, glued, painted paper that disrupts the uniform flatness of the traditional support. This tactile relief does not suggest optical depth — it doesn’t simulate volumes, but physically translates the convulsions of a damaged surface, agitated by internal tremors. It is not an illusionistic modeling like in Baroque landscapes, but a real, frontal crumpling, without perspective.
This crumpled matter materializes a ground with no scale, no horizon, no anchor point. The viewer hovers above a space seen from above, like a geological map without coordinates, where the surface becomes a palimpsest. Onto this organic field are imposed sharply defined geometric shapes — triangles, squares, rectangles, circles — whose clarity radically contrasts with the accidents of the paper. These elements are not introduced to organize a deep space, but to intensify the tension of the surface. They do not suggest atmospheric perspective or symbolic spatiality. They assert themselves like arbitrary cuts — foreign interventions upon a resisting ground.
One might think of Robert Smithson’s ‘Non-Sites’, where displaced and stressed materials form raw confrontations between form and terrain. Or of Alberto Burri, whose ‘Cretti’ and burned canvases affirm the irreducible materiality of the surface as a site of fracture and memory. In René Mayer’s case, however, this materiality remains inseparable from a graphic logic. The crumpled paper is not left to chance — it is orchestrated with precision, composed in deliberate interaction with defined forms. The image is built, not stumbled upon.
In this series, the cancellation of perspective operates on two levels: through the absence of optical depth, and through the conflicted coexistence of matter and drawing. This dual strategy blocks all illusionistic reading. The viewer cannot project their gaze into an elsewhere; they remain faced with a surface in turmoil, torn open, shaped by forms that do not seek to unify space, but rather to open it like a wound. The surface becomes a battlefield — a plane of tension between opposing forces: softness and rigidity, randomness and geometry, crumpling and line.
This formal choice resonates with reflections formulated by Georges Didi-Huberman on the surface as the site of visual events. In ‘What We See, What Looks at Us’, he writes: ‘the visible is never given as a whole, but always torn, cut, wounded’. This is precisely what René Mayer reveals: a conflicted, fragmented visible, without overall cohesion — where the gaze is not absorbed, but held in a state of active tension.
Here, the earth is not represented as landscape, nor as idealized nature. It is evoked as a vulnerable, contested surface. It is neither a scene nor a background, but a field of forces. One could relate this approach to that of Mona Hatoum, whose cartographic works redraw territories as conflict zones rather than stable entities. Yet where Hatoum mobilizes explicit geopolitical references, René Mayer works within a radical abstraction, where meaning remains suspended.
By refusing all perspective and any hierarchical spatialization, René Mayer prevents the emergence of a central viewpoint. There is no place for a sovereign gaze or a panoramic viewpoint. This stance aligns with critiques of perspective developed in the twentieth century, particularly by Minimalist and Land Art artists who saw the perspectival system as an ideological tool of control. The cancellation of perspective in René Mayer’s work thus acts as a silent destabilization of the gaze. It deprives the image of depth not to flatten it, but to activate it. The surface becomes a site of interruption — a space not to be contemplated, but to be confronted.
What is at stake in “Moving Earth” is not the representation of nature, but a confrontation with the materiality of the image itself. The painting ceases to be a window — it becomes a wall. A wall that doesn’t conceal, but exposes. A wall that doesn’t divide, but resists.
“Imperceptible Shift” – Geometry of Chance on a Controlled Surface
The “Imperceptible Shift” series, centered on the recurring motif of the casino chip, pushes to its extreme the logic that René Mayer applies to his entire pictorial work. The compositional layout is rigorously constructed, yet this rigor produces neither illusionistic space nor any effect of depth. The chips are painted or affixed with almost algorithmic precision — but without recourse to the visual conventions of perspective. Clustered, aligned, at times nearly symmetrical, they build no volume. Their placement does not converge on a vanishing point: it abolishes any centrality, any spatial hierarchy. This refusal is not passive — it embodies a form of resistance to classical compositional logic.
Each chip has its own visual presence. Their sizes vary, their colors contrast or interlock — but never according to any logic of simulated nearness or distance. They are graphic units, not represented objects. They are neither closer nor farther away: they are simply there, placed on the same surface, equidistant from the gaze. This asserted flatness links the series to the tradition of early 20th-century geometric abstraction, but sets it apart through its sustained tension between structure and disruption. The ensemble at times evokes the unstable balance of Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s compositions or the non-hierarchical arrangements of André Cadere — but without ever giving in to disorder or spontaneity.
Within this rigorous framework, the cancellation of perspective becomes a decisive choice. It neutralizes any possibility of spatial narration. It blocks the gaze from constructing a background or imagining depth. The viewer is condemned to remain at the surface, to scan laterally, to examine the relationships between elements rather than locate them in space. This critical gesture recalls certain analyses by Rosalind Krauss on the modernist grid: by refusing depth, the grid reveals the very structure of the image. But where Krauss identifies a logic of autonomy, René Mayer introduces disorder into order, chance into system.
Though fully integrated into the surface, the chips are not governed by pure mechanics. Their distribution follows an internal logic, yes — but one that resists deciphering. It defies analysis. The overall impression is that of a system designed to accommodate unpredictability. Viewers may detect motifs, sequences, symmetries — but these are immediately blurred, displaced, contradicted. This visual fluctuation holds attention in a state of ongoing tension. Nothing settles.
This apparent instability is one of the most subtle effects of perspective cancellation. By refusing traditional spatialization, René Mayer denies the gaze any visual comfort. The point is not to reject order, but to refuse reassuring order. The canvas is not a place for projection, but for confrontation. The viewer does not enter the image — they are confronted with it. The surface acts like a magnetic field, where each element attracts or repels the others — without generating any illusion of depth. Painting becomes a system without center, a space without orientation.
This type of composition echoes, in some respects, the musical experiments of John Cage, where chance is not the negation of form, but a way to displace intention. In René Mayer’s work, it is not randomness that governs the surface, but a structure that accommodates measured imbalances. Perspective cancellation becomes a way to hold these divergent forces together on a single plane — without ever ranking or subordinating them. The unity of the painting emerges not from perspective, but from the coexistence of singularities.
One might also draw a conceptual parallel to works by Hanne Darboven or Roman Opalka, where the accumulation of repeated signs produces an experience that is both temporal and visual. In “Imperceptible Shift”, the chip motif is at once image, unit of measure, and rhythmic disturbance. It establishes a relation to pictorial time — through repetition and variation — without ever slipping into narration or spatial illusion.
Thus, the “Imperceptible Shift” series crystallizes a core tension in René Mayer’s work: a surface governed by internal rules, yet open to uncertainty. Here, the cancellation of perspective is not a simplification — it is a refinement. It allows the gaze to remain suspended in a state of fertile instability, where every element matters, but none dominates. The surface is no longer a screen for hidden depth: it becomes the site where a demanding visual logic unfolds — capable of receiving chance without surrendering to it.
The Absence of Depth as a Structuring Principle
It would be reductive to read René Mayer’s cancellation of perspective as a mere formal decision or a stylistic effect inherited from modernist abstraction. This refusal is neither formalism nor historical citation — it reflects a fundamental orientation in his work, a way of framing the gaze and constructing the image. The absence of depth operates as a structuring principle, on par with frontality or the balance of forms. To reject depth is to reject the implicit hierarchy that perspective organizes. It is to renounce a worldview built on the domination of a single point of view, on the primacy of the observing subject, and on the structuring of space according to the logic of projection. In this sense, the cancellation of perspective acts as a deactivation of distance. It abolishes the possibility of a background — of a visual ‘elsewhere’ — to force the gaze to remain here, now, at the surface.
This choice implies a radical shift: each form matters, not for its place in an illusory space, but for its immediate interaction with the others. Every element is set on the same plane — literally and conceptually. There is no depth to retreat into, no backdrop to house the imaginary. The painting becomes an active field, a place of confrontation between signs, colors, gestures, and materials. This frontality, which might appear austere, instead generates a particular intensity — one of co-presence, visual density, and a gaze with no way out.
From this perspective, the cancellation of perspective aligns with critical reflections developed since the 1960s by artists such as Hans Haacke, Daniel Buren, or Adrian Piper, who questioned the conditions of visibility and regimes of representation. Yet in René Mayer’s case, this gesture is not articulated through textuality or the museum apparatus. It manifests in visual rigor, in the tightly constructed surface, in the economy of effects. It is less about denouncing than about showing otherwise: making painting a non-hierarchical space, where the logic of seeing no longer reproduces the logic of power.
This logic remains constant across series. In “Finiteness”, the juxtaposed or cut-up bodies — taken from anonymous photocopies — obey no optical hierarchy. They are arranged as floating fragments, subjected to variations of color or filter, yet always on the same plane, without depth or staging. The same holds true in Eyes, where ocular motifs are scattered with no point of convergence. The gaze does not land on a subject — it is turned back on itself, caught in a network of signs without fixed direction.
In “Experiments”, this logic becomes even more explicit. Geometric elements, mechanical grids, chromatic rhythms respond to one another in a field without hierarchy. The painting is not a scene — it is a structure. And this structure conceals nothing: it asserts its materiality, its two-dimensionality, its bare presence. The absence of depth is not a limitation, but a condition for legibility. It enables the image to be thought of as a system of interactions, rather than a representation of the external world.
It is essential to emphasize that this rejection of depth never leads, in René Mayer’s work, to rigidity or analytical coldness. On the contrary, it is this radical choice that opens a space for meaning. Painting becomes a site of attention, an exercise of the gaze. It is not an environment into which one enters, but a field in which one becomes involved. The artwork doesn’t offer a journey — it generates a tension. It does not guide — it demands.
This is what makes the cancellation of perspective a matter of principle. It marks a stance within the visual field: not to seduce with illusion, not to flatter the eye, but to engage it differently. It affirms that every form deserves to be looked at for itself — not for its role in a narrative composition. This reversal, discreet but fundamental, makes René Mayer’s painting a practice of exactitude. Exactitude of the surface. Exactitude of the forms. Exactitude of the gaze.
Conclusion: A Gaze Without Vanishing Point
Far from being a gesture of rupture or a simple rejection of tradition, the cancellation of perspective in René Mayer’s work emerges as a structuring principle. This formal choice runs discreetly but consistently through his entire pictorial practice. It is not a dogmatic refusal of depth, but a way of reorganizing the visual field beyond any spatial hierarchy. The painting ceases to be a window — it becomes a tense, active surface, where each element exists equally alongside the others, without vanishing point, without center of gravity.
In this asserted frontality, nothing is projected — everything is presented. The forms are not there to suggest an illusion, but to establish a relationship. Whether in the traversed squares of Boxes, the crumpled surfaces of “Moving Earth”, or the scattered motifs of “Imperceptible Shift”, the gaze is never led into a background. It remains in direct contact with the surface, forced to circulate across it, with no perspective to escape through. This shift changes not only how we look — but also what we look at: painting becomes a field of operations, not of representations.
In René Mayer’s work, the plane is not defined merely by what it rejects — depth, simulation, the central viewpoint — but by what it enables: the coexistence of tensions, the balance between structure and disturbance, the lateral reading of form. This choice of the surface, assumed as a compositional foundation, is what gives his work its visual coherence. Each painting is constructed as a space without outside — one that is not entered, but confronted in its silent organization.
Thus, to reject perspective is not to deny space — but to reconfigure its conditions. In René Mayer’s work, this gesture is neither rhetorical nor theoretical. It is visual, rigorous, and fundamentally structuring. It shapes the image, guides the gaze, and affirms a position: that of an art that does not direct — but proposes; that does not depict a world — but constructs a surface where the real can present itself differently.
