Pozzo's View

The Quadratura series reinterprets the optical theatrics of Baroque ceiling painting for a contemporary, hybrid medium. James McGrath takes the work of Jesuit artist Andrea Pozzo—whose frescoes at Sant’Ignazio in Rome remain masterpieces of perspectival illusion—as a conceptual and spatial foundation. In Pozzo’s tradition, architecture dissolves into fiction, and sacred figures float above, framed by impossible perspectives. McGrath uses 3D rendering and digital cloth simulation to construct fictional architectural spaces, which are then rendered in oil paint. These simulated environments echo the dramatic topography of Pozzo’s ceilings—folded narratives, hovering figures, and deep illusionistic space—but are reimagined through the lens of contemporary software. In these works, the ceiling is no longer above us—it peels open, collapses, or floats sideways. The viewer’s position becomes unstable, shifting between architectural witness and theatrical participant. Each composition is a collapse of histories: of perspectival systems, narrative formats, and religious iconography. As folds of painted architecture drift toward abstraction, McGrath reopens the question of what perspective means in a time when images are no longer tethered to gravity or geometry. Quadratura continues McGrath’s exploration of spatial ambiguity and digital re-translation of historical visual systems. It is both homage and disruption—a series that asks what happens when sacred illusion is simulated, flattened, and reanimated.