A historic chapel in France has been transformed into a breathtaking chromatic experience through an innovative art installation called ECHOVERSE. Berlin-based artist Tomislav Topić has created this optical masterpiece using 451 translucent mesh layers in 57 different colors at the Centre d'art Les 3 CHA in Châteaugiron, France. The installation will remain on display through December 14th, 2025, offering visitors a unique blend of contemporary art within a medieval setting.
The ambitious project spans thirteen suspended modules that rise nearly sixteen meters high, creating what appears to be a floating field of color throughout the chapel's interior. After more than a year of research and development, followed by five intensive days of on-site assembly, ECHOVERSE has successfully transformed the heavy stone architecture into an environment where color behaves like sound waves. The installation creates a contemporary, weightless counterpoint to the chapel's traditional stone volumes and medieval timber ceiling.
From ground level, visitors experience ECHOVERSE as a slow-moving gradient that appears frozen in mid-flow. The overlapping mesh sheets create flowing bands of violet, red, orange, and blue that shift in saturation as natural daylight filters through the chapel's historic stained-glass windows. The incredibly thin material allows the color fields to hover with remarkable softness, catching and refracting ambient light to project faint ripples onto the surrounding walls and floor.
These chromatic shadows function as secondary drawings that extend the installation beyond its physical boundaries, encouraging visitors to view the work from multiple angles and positions. The suspended modules trace a loose wave pattern that seems to rise and fall along the length of the chapel space, creating a corridor for what Topić describes as "chromatic drift." This design echoes the artist's fascination with rhythm and visual sound, key elements in his artistic practice.
Topology and repetition are central themes in Tomislav Topić's work, which draws inspiration from color design and the spatial sensitivities of urban art. The artist's geometric compositions typically involve minimal interventions that amplify the character of existing sites, altering perception without overwhelming the original architecture. In ECHOVERSE, this approach creates a dialogue between the medieval timber ceiling, which serves as a canopy for the contemporary gradient, and the elongated nave of the chapel.
The artist chose the title ECHOVERSE for its multiple layers of meaning, explaining it as "a polyphonic weave of perception and repetition – every color, every layer, every viewpoint echoes another, like lines of a poem or waves of sound moving through space." This concept becomes tangible as viewers move beneath the installation, where small shifts in viewing angle produce entirely new interpretations of the same elements. The work successfully demonstrates how contemporary art can enhance and complement historic architecture while creating an entirely new sensory experience for visitors.
