Eccentric Lenses Turn Bali’s Landscape into a Kinetic Optical Field
With Eccentric Lenses, Vincent Leroy transforms the Balinese landscape into a shifting optical field. Composed of a constellation of Fresnel lenses, the kinetic sculpture responds to the wind, continuously reframing, fragmenting, and displacing its surroundings. Set against Bali’s lush vegetation and distant mountains, the lenses introduce a new layer of movement into the landscape. Each element rotates around an off-center axis, following an eccentric trajectory that makes its movement appear less like a mechanical rotation than a slow drift through space. Activated by the wind, the mobile is never entirely still and never repeats the same configuration. As the lenses move, the landscape seen through them is constantly transformed. Mountains, rice fields, trees and sky are inverted, fragmented and brought into unexpected proximity. What appears stable beyond the sculpture becomes fluid, shifting from one lens to another and continuously recomposing itself according to movement, light and the viewer’s position.
Eccentric Lenses set against the mountains and rice fields of Munduk | all images Vincent Leroy
Vincent Leroy’s work composes a Kinetic Field of Fresnel Lenses
Eccentric Lenses explores a different kind of rotation; one in which the center is displaced, and the axis becomes uncertain. Rather than turning around a fixed point, each lens describes its own eccentric movement, creating a collective choreography across the landscape. Individually autonomous, the lenses together form a single kinetic optical field. The work by artist Vincent Leroy establishes a dialogue between the precise geometry of the lenses and the unpredictability of their natural environment. The wind becomes an invisible collaborator, continuously activating the sculpture and reshaping the way the surrounding landscape is perceived. In Eccentric Lenses, movement does not belong solely to the sculpture. Through the shifting surfaces of the Fresnel lenses, the landscape itself appears to move.
where one landscape becomes many
many lenses, many points of view
where the horizon slips between the lenses
a mountain, endlessly rearranged
landscapes within landscapes
as daylight begins to drift