The Architecture of Illusion

There are moments when reality slips, not violently, but with grace.A wall tilts. A reflection doesn’t quite align. The world you trust folds in on itself, and for a second, you’re suspended between what is and what could be.

This is the space Leandro Erlich inhabits.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1973, Erlich has built a career out of bending perception, not through trickery, but through poetry. His installations blur the familiar until it becomes strange again. Elevators lead nowhere, façades lie flat on the ground, rooms turn upside down. He doesn’t ask us to believe in magic; he simply invites us to question our certainty.

To walk into one of his works is to participate in a quiet rebellion against logic. The line between viewer and participant dissolves. You are no longer looking, you are inside the illusion, complicit in its deception, aware of the beauty in being fooled.

His art exists somewhere between architecture and daydream, physical yet fragile, meticulously constructed yet fleeting. Like memory, it demands both presence and surrender.

Helsinki Through the Looking Glass

Currently, the artist presents his first solo exhibition in Finland at Amos Rex Museum, Helsinki, open from October 8, 2025 to April 6, 2026.The show gathers some of his most iconic works, including new site-specific installations that reimagine the urban landscape of Helsinki as a stage for visual paradoxes.

Here, the museum becomes a labyrinth of reflections: windows open onto nothing, staircases twist back into themselves, and the city outside feels subtly re-engineered.The visitor is not merely invited to look, but to lose orientation gracefully.

In a time when images flood our lives with absolute clarity, Erlich reminds us that there’s refinement in uncertainty. That art, like life, is most profound when it resists explanation.

Because illusion, too, is architecture.

It’s built from light, from trust, from the delicate balance between what we know and what we’re willing to unsee.