Tobias Rehberger is an artist who made one of my all-time favorite pieces of automotive-inspired art: his series of knockoff cars made from simple sketches. Clearly, I’m not the only Rehberger fan out there, since Aston Martin just had him make their new 24 Hours of LeMans art car.
For these Aston Martin cars, Rehberger is approaching the work by focusing on the main defining principle of a racecar: motion.
“My design for the Aston Martin art car is rooted in my interest in distorted perception and related phenomena like auto moving patterns, optical effects, camouflage and visual confusion, which I have addressed in many works before. In this case, the design is based on a geometric optical effect pattern. Comparable to a fast object, a steady fixation on a point of the pattern is impossible.”
Rehberger has explored these ideas in the past, such as his “Dazzle Ship London” warships and a long history of works that explore optical illusions and the nature of vision.
These Astons, using repeating patterns of vertical stripes in black, orange, yellow, white, dark and light blue, are actually hard and confusing to look at when stationary, and definitely feel like something distorted by motion. In fact. even beyond normal vision, they seem like rapidly moving objects seen on a TV or other pixel-based display; they’re not exactly pixellated, but the sort of banded visual distortions do have a sort of moire-pattern video-glitch feeling to them.
I like these cars, and I think Aston Martin made a smart choice picking Rehburger. I’m really curious to see how these look in motion, too.
Contact the author at jason@jalopnik.com.