How Perspective in Art Can Change the Way We Understand Reality – Art, Perception, and Hidden Detail

Sometimes, when I stop to look at a work of art, I feel like an insect walking across a painting. When I'm too close, I can't understand anything about it. Everything seems like chaos, a mess of dots and lines, colors blending into an irreparable confusion. I feel lost, as if I'm trying to understand the meaning of a dream in a semi-conscious state. It's like trying to read a page of text when the light is too dim, and the letters are just outlines. I don't understand the words, just the shapes, and nothing seems to make sense.

But here's what's interesting: If I take a step back, everything changes. I push reality a little further away, and suddenly, the image makes sense. The colors that once seemed like a chaotic blend now open a window into a whole world. The lines that appeared meaningless now form a landscape or a mood, and the color splashes come together to create a portrait of an emotion. When I take a step back, I see the entire canvas. I see it in its entirety, with all its complexity.

This, I believe, is a choice we constantly make in our lives: to get closer to reality or to distance ourselves just enough to understand the meaning. Just like in art, life is a series of details that, when seen up close, may seem useless, confusing, or even frightening. Everyday problems, small failures, unanswered questions – all these are like those color splashes that don't seem to connect. If we stay too close to them, we can't see the bigger picture. But if we step back, maybe we will understand that these details are part of a much bigger story, one that goes far beyond our immediate understanding.

Thinking about this, I came to a question that I've been carrying with me for some time: how many things in our lives are the same? How many things lose their meaning when we try to understand them in the short term? Maybe our immediate reality is just one part of a much bigger painting. Maybe we, just like an insect crawling on a painting, can't grasp the true nature of what we see because we don't have the "perspective" to fully comprehend it. Perhaps there's a "painting" that we can't see, but if we took a step back, it would reveal itself in all its grandeur.

And maybe this "perspective" is exactly what we seek in art. Art is not just a way to express reality as we see it. Art is a means to allow us to look beyond what is immediately in front of us, beyond the details, beyond the daily noise. Art gives us a framework for understanding that reality is not a series of isolated events, but a story woven over time. Perhaps art is exactly this path through which we try to take a step back and look at reality from another dimension, in order to understand it better.

But let’s not forget that each of us has our own "distortion" of the world. Just like the insect that doesn’t understand the image of a painting, we, as human beings, are limited by our perceptions. Perhaps we don't see everything we should see, maybe we don't fully understand what lies beyond our senses. But that's exactly why we are called to explore, to occasionally step away from the "details" of life to see the bigger picture. Perhaps true knowledge doesn't lie in understanding every detail up close, but in understanding what lies beyond what we see.

Ultimately, I believe that art is more than a simple representation of reality. It is an invitation to look from a different angle, to ask ourselves what lies beyond what we know. Art is an invitation to "see" not just with our eyes, but with our mind and soul. And perhaps, in this process, we learn to see reality as we've never seen it before – like a painting that only makes sense when we truly look at it.