Roland Schimmel
Jumpin' Jack Flash

The composition of ovals on orange appears simple, but the mural still has a great impact on the space. The colour combination of the floating dots – turquoise and pink – creates an active effect in the eye, causing them to seem to dance on the wall, setting the whole in motion. Are they atomic particles, gas bubbles, a star system, or confetti?

The artist Roland Schimmel selected this spot near the sports hall for his mural Jumpin’ Jack Flash, titled after the well-known song by the Rolling Stones. If you stare at a form with an even colour for long enough, your eye produces afterimages with the same shape in a complementary colour – blue versus orange, for instance. They are projections from our brain, on our retina. We also project perspective on the abstract forms: it is as if round discs move away from us, while they are merely ovals. This effect is stronger with Schimmel’s larger mural, Hope for Happiness.

The same sort of energy, from a shimmering, setting sun, is also palpable in the smaller Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Schimmel wrote of this commission, “While in normal life the dynamic of appearances and temptation is employed to divert us in all sorts of ways, in my work the dynamic is used to bring the viewer back to himself as a source of energy.”