Fractured Light: The Geometric Cathedral

Claude Monet’s  Rouen Cathedral at Sunset (1894) captures the fleeting dance of light upon stone, transforming the weight of architecture into something ethereal. Through layers of Impressionist color, the cathedral becomes a vessel for time itself, dissolving into shifting hues of gold, crimson, and deep blue. Monet painted the same façade repeatedly, revealing not just its form but its fluid existence under ever-changing skies. 

This abstract geometric reinterpretation fractures that vision further, breaking light, space, and structure into angular shards of perception. The cathedral still looms, but it no longer exists as a singular entity. Instead, its presence is scattered across the composition, fragmented into planes of color and glass-like reflections. The gothic architecture—once bound by physicality—is now in motion, deconstructing and reassembling within the chaotic brilliance of geometric abstraction. 

At the center, a burst of golden light radiates outward, as though the cathedral’s essence has been shattered and reconfigured through a prism of modernity. The rigid, linear structures overlaying the scene suggest the intrusion of time—past and present colliding in a moment of dissolution and reconstruction. The geometry, sharp and mechanical, contrasts against Monet’s soft Impressionist brushwork, creating a tension between organic light and rigid form, between the fluid and the fixed. 

Color remains the defining force in this transformation. Monet’s palette of sunlit golds and warm ambers persists, yet it is now refracted, divided into angular segments that pulse with movement. The deep blues and shadowed edges of the cathedral no longer sit quietly in the background; they are fractured, layered, turned into shifting perspectives that alter with every glance. The luminous center acts as both a source of radiance and destruction, a reminder that light itself is both creator and eraser of form. 

As an artist, my intention with this piece was to explore how perception is inherently unstable—how what we see is never a single truth, but a collection of impressions, perspectives, and moments intersecting in constant flux. Monet painted the cathedral as a study of impermanence, showing how it changed with the passage of the sun. Here, that transience is taken to an extreme, where structure is no longer just eroded by light, but entirely reconstructed within it. The gothic towers, once solid, are now spectral—flickering in and out of existence within the angles of broken color. 

The golden explosion at the core represents the collision of past and present, the way history is not static but reinterpreted, reshaped by every era that looks upon it. The geometric shards reflect the modern world, where architecture is no longer simply stone, but glass and steel, light and reflection, angles and movement. The cathedral, a relic of faith and permanence, is now an ever-changing construct of perception, of memory, of shifting realities. 

This piece is not just about a cathedral, nor just about abstraction—it is about the transformation of vision itself, the way we rebuild what we see through the filters of time, context, and technology. Through this composition, I wanted to evoke the sensation of seeing history through a fractured lens, where the past is both luminous and unstable, where architecture becomes a fluid entity, and where light is the true master of creation and dissolution.