The City as Canvas, the Night as Stage

At 115 feet tall and saturated in an otherworldly red, SpY’s OVOID doesn’t merely light up Riyadh—it recalibrates it. Suspended beneath the Wadi Hanifah Bridge like a divine punctuation mark, this glowing ellipse doesn’t ask for your attention; it hijacks it. The world slows when you face OVOID. Cars become insects. Bridges, ribcages. Your own body—suddenly too small, too soft—feels newly aware of its presence.

The installation, part of Noor Riyadh, the city’s annual love letter to luminous public art, is monumental in form but ephemeral in nature. And that tension—between brute scale and fleeting spectacle—is where SpY, the elusive Spanish artist known for reshaping urban reality, thrives.

A Monument to Perception

OVOID is not a sculpture. It’s a threshold, an invitation to rethink space itself. From a distance, it levitates. Step closer and it grounds you in place, demanding you confront not just it, but yourself within it. The reflection in the water doubles the illusion—like a red eye blinking back at you from a parallel city.

SpY describes it as “a profoundly physical and sensory experience,” and he’s not wrong. But what makes it remarkable isn’t just its technical prowess or visual intensity—it’s the way it redefines the viewer. You’re no longer a passerby. You’re implicated. You’re reflected. The installation gazes back.

This is not the tidy, Instagrammable “immersive experience” that’s come to plague contemporary art. It’s a phenomenon, a rupture in the routine fabric of city life that temporarily rewires your internal architecture.

Scale as Psychological Weapon

Let’s talk size. Yes, 115 feet is large. But in the presence of Riyadh’s monumental bridge pillars, OVOID flirts with the absurd—it appears, strangely, small. And this is where SpY’s genius quietly detonates. The installation plays with relative scale like a mischievous physicist, using architectural context to disorient and recalibrate the eye.

Scale here isn’t about measurement—it’s about emotion. About how large a thing feels when it suddenly appears where it shouldn’t. About how something so simple—a red ellipse—can press your perception into new shapes, make your body feel a little less certain of itself in the landscape it once knew.

Public Art as Urban Disruption

SpY’s work isn’t content to be looked at. It wants to interrupt. His past pieces—like ORB in Montreal or the floating sculpture in Giza—don’t decorate public space, they destabilize it. With OVOID, the artist once again challenges the passive neutrality of the city.

The streets are not just stages, but living organisms in constant evolution.

– He says.

In that spirit, OVOID isn’t just an object; it’s a living pulse. A momentary glitch in the system that jolts citizens out of autopilot. It doesn’t beautify the city. It awakens it.

This isn’t art that whispers meaning. It glows it, pulses it, reflects it in water and steel and glass, making the city complicit in the illusion.

The Surreal as Mirror

What gives OVOID its true surrealist energy is its dislocation. Its color—a burning, blood-orange red—isn’t decorative. It’s hypnotic. Among Riyadh’s tidy whites and golds, the red becomes alien, almost dangerous. It casts the familiar in a strange new light—literally. Shadows behave differently. Your own silhouette feels borrowed.

Surrealism here isn’t nostalgia. It’s not Magritte’s apples or Dalí’s clocks. It’s temporal slippage, the soft, seductive confusion that arises when the known world is ever-so-slightly misaligned. OVOID achieves this not through complexity, but clarity. It is one shape, one color, one act of public interruption. And it’s enough.

Beyond the Object

SpY is not interested in permanence. His art doesn’t seek legacy—it seeks rupture. OVOID is temporary, but that’s the point. Like a dream remembered upon waking, its power lies in its aftereffect.

People will return to the bridge long after the glow is gone. They’ll remember how big it felt. How quiet the city became for a moment. How the water, for once, didn’t reflect concrete but light.

And that, perhaps, is the secret mission of public art that works: not to be worshiped, but to linger. Not to impose meaning, but to raise questions that echo long after the installation is dismantled.

In a time when cities are engineered for efficiency and control, SpY’s OVOID offers a moment of exquisite uncertainty. A poetic disruption. A visual haiku in red. And in that brief flicker—under a bridge, above a reflection—we are not merely citizens, but witnesses to what happens when perception becomes art.