Neles back-WorkinProgress

Written By jorge cruz

The architecture seemed to dissolve.

Chiesa di Sant’ Ignazio, Rome

The first time I looked up at the ceiling of Chiesa di Sant’Ignazio in Rome, it wasn’t immediately clear where architecture ended and illusion began. The stone structure seemed to dissolve. Columns extended beyond their physical limits, and painted figures hovered in an open sky that felt continuous rather than enclosed.

The ceiling was painted by Andrea Pozzo, and its effect depends entirely on perception. Nothing actually opens above you. The surface is flat. But for a moment, that fact becomes secondary. What matters is the sensation of ground disappearing — the feeling that structure gives way to space.

The figures don’t read as distant or unreachable. They appear suspended, close, almost accessible if viewed from the right position. The ceiling doesn’t press downward. It expands upward. It reframes the boundary between physical construction and imagined depth.

That image stayed with me and eventually entered my work.

A client came to me for her first tattoo, a full back piece. She chose a whale from my catalogue — a stable image, calm, heavy, grounded. While working on the composition, I kept returning to the memory of Pozzo’s ceiling. I started to imagine the whale not as something anchored, but as something drifting through a space where structure and openness overlap.

I reworked the design, placing the whale inside a loose, sketch-like interpretation of Pozzo’s illusion. The architectural lines were suggested rather than defined. The goal wasn’t to recreate the ceiling, but to translate its logic — a space without clear edges, where orientation is uncertain and movement feels suspended.

The tattoo remains unfinished. We paused before it was complete.

That incompletion feels appropriate. Some images don’t resolve themselves all at once. They stay open, provisional, still in motion — much like the illusion itself, which only exists as long as you keep looking.

This tattoo was made at Flourish Studio in Lisbon. The studio no longer exists, but the work done there continues to circulate through the pieces that were made within it.

text by nOT

references:

jorge cruz
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