Youri Messen-Jaschin
For more than six decades, Youri Messen-Jaschin has pursued a single question: how can a static artwork produce a convincing sensation of movement? His work in Op Art uses geometry, color, contrast, rhythm, and changing viewing positions to create optical effects that are not immediately apparent. The image remains still, but perception does not.
Messen-Jaschin grew up in an intellectual and artistic environment, surrounded by musicians, writers, painters, theater directors, stage designers, and his parents’ collections of art and unusual objects. Conversations about literature, music, theater, and visual art were part of everyday life. Creativity was not treated as exceptional. It was simply a way of paying attention to the world.
As a young man, he made a decisive choice to become an artist despite his father’s reservations. His father offered support for a more conventional professional path, but made clear that an artistic life would require independence. Messen-Jaschin chose art, accepting its uncertainty and responsibility. The decision allowed him to study, travel, and develop a practice centered on visual perception.
His education included the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the École Cantonale des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, and artistic research at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. He also worked as an assistant to painters Ernest Pizzotti and Friedrich Kuhn, collaborated with Franz Jansen on performance projects in the Netherlands, and deepened his printmaking knowledge at the Centre de la Gravure Contemporaine in Geneva.
Those years required practical resilience. Messen-Jaschin supported himself through weekend and night work while studying. In Paris, he lived in a small, poorly heated attic room and often ate at the Saint-Séverin Church soup kitchen. The conversations he had there with people living in poverty remained significant. Later, friends, family, foundations, and occasional sales of drawings and woodcuts helped him continue his studies. These experiences reinforced his sense of independence and his lasting gratitude for the generosity of others.
Woodcut printmaking was an early medium through which Messen-Jaschin began to establish his reputation. Critics noted affinities between those works and what would later become his commitment to Op Art. He subsequently expanded into screen printing, painting, sculpture, tapestry, aluminum, Plexiglas, and installations using light, LEDs, and neon. He does not select a medium for variety alone. Each work determines its own material requirements through an extended process of research and development.
The work is not meant to be consumed instantly. Its optical effects depend on the viewer’s movement, distance, angle, and patience. A person passing quickly may see a geometric composition. A viewer who slows down, shifts position, and observes from different points may begin to see movement, transformation, or changing dimensions. The artwork becomes interactive because perception completes it.
“It is an exploration of perception rather than the creation of images,” Messen-Jaschin explains. His studio operates as a research space in which every work attempts an illusion he has not achieved before. The central objective is not to repeat an established effect, but to create a new encounter between the eye, the brain, and a static composition.
A defining moment came while studying in Gothenburg, when Messen-Jaschin met Jesús Rafael Soto, Carlos Cruz-Diez, and Julio Le Parc at the Göteborg Konsthall. Their work confirmed the direction he would pursue: movement and optical experience within nonmoving objects. He also cites Henry Moore, Alexander Calder, M. C. Escher, Wassily Kandinsky, and Robert Delaunay as important figures, not as models to imitate but as artists who expanded his understanding of form, color, movement, and creative inquiry.
Literature, architecture, concrete music, performance, and travel have broadened that inquiry. Messen-Jaschin has met artists, architects, scientists, musicians, writers, and people from many cultural backgrounds. These encounters do not provide ready-made subject matter. Instead, they generate new questions about visual structure and perception.
His dialogue with science has been particularly important. A five-year collaboration with neuroscientists used functional MRI to study how viewers’ brains responded to his artworks. The research, involving Lausanne University Hospital, the Max Planck Institute, and Vilnius University, examined why different viewers experience optical effects in different ways, including sensations such as dizziness. The project was later published in French as L’Op Art rencontre les neurosciences.
Messen-Jaschin has also worked with mathematicians, engineers, architects, master craftsmen, and screen printers. He regards collaboration as valuable when it opens a question that cannot be addressed in isolation. Screen printers including Lorenz Boegli and Stainer Druck have helped him resolve technical problems, while conversations with mathematician Noémie Combe have expanded his thinking about geometry and movement.
His process has no fixed ritual or daily timetable. He works seven days a week, but lets research set the pace. When an idea does not work, he puts it aside rather than forcing a conclusion. It may take days, months, or years for the appropriate solution to emerge. Failure, detours, and abandoned attempts remain part of the research.
For Messen-Jaschin, success is not defined by market value. It is the ability to continue working, remain curious, and surprise both himself and viewers with a new optical experience. He is currently developing new works involving materials, pigments, and printing techniques, while continuing his interest in the relationship between art and neuroscience. He is also completing two books based on his experiences in Argentina during the military dictatorship and in the Amazon with Indigenous communities.
Across his work, Messen-Jaschin’s invitation is consistent: slow down, look longer, and allow perception to become active.
