Solved the Da Vinci code

Solved the Da Vinci code: everything you know about Mona Lisa is wrong

I am convinced that art becomes popular because it carries a truth. A truth you may not be able to put into words yet, but it is there, in colour and matter. Finding that truth and understanding it is, for me, the joy of art. It is why I paint, and it is why I look at paintings the way other people take apart engines.

It started when I copied Van Gogh's Starry Night at the age of six. Did he paint it that way because he found it beautiful? Did he have an eye condition and simply see the world like that? Or was he so sensitive that he perceived something, a twist in the light, that everyone feels but only he could put into form?

The same with the Mona Lisa. Why does she look at you? Art history answers with technique: sfumato, thirty layers of glaze, the missing eyebrows, the soft corners of the mouth that make the smile flicker in your peripheral vision. Fine. You can list all of it. As an explanation it makes no sense to me. As soon as we take art for granted, it is dead. We should always question the status quo.

A photograph is not what you see

Much of my work is about how a painting is perceived in a room, how AI perceives images, and how our brain sees stereoscopically. In 2018 I constructed a figure from two eye views: one drawing for the left eye, one for the right, laid over each other as a stereo pair, with the diagrams of the binocular setup next to it.

I paint with a two-metre brush so I can paint large pictures from where the viewer stands. It makes a difference. It makes a difference whether you copy a photograph and scale it up, or whether you notice that our spatial perception is more than a photograph. A photograph is only a distorted projection of a three-dimensional room onto a plane. I have analysed many paintings this way and spent years on it.

The wall

On my reinterpretation of Liberty Leading the People it hit me hardest. I stood in front of the wall, 260 by 325 centimetres, and felt the urge to make the heads wider, longer, to distort them. I wanted to find out why.

The reason is simple once you see it. A viewer in front of a wall that size looks at its edges from a completely different angle than at its centre. The figures at the edges land differently on the retina. Paint them anatomically correct and they look wrong from where people actually stand. So you pre-distort them. Art history has names for the neighbouring tricks, anamorphosis, di sotto in sù, quadratura, but not for this one. Painters did it anyway.

David did it

Put Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii next to his study for it. In the study the stairs are in the foreground, the woman sits further back, the warrior holds his spear behind him. Lay the two on top of each other: he started bottom left, got wider and wider, dropped the stairs, and stretched the whole picture vertically. It makes sense. Painted one to one, the distortion of the large room would have looked odd as you walk in. The stairs would feel wrong, the warriors somehow thin. He corrected the room, not the anatomy.

Then the idea

Once you think like this, the next idea comes by itself: paint a 3D picture. Paint a face frontally, then paint the same face again, distorted, as seen from the side, and lay the two into one. I tried it. And while I was doing it, I had to think of the Mona Lisa.

The code

Leonardo constructed this painting. The person in the X-ray images, the one with the narrow head, is the actual Mona Lisa. The other one appears through the perspective distortion from right and left. All you have to manage is that whatever is too much from each perspective gets optically concealed. And that is exactly what Leonardo did with the hairband, the veil and the chin.

What reads as a veil in one moment reads as hair in its compressed form. What is a hairband in one moment is the edge of the hair in the next. What is a shifted jaw in one moment is a sly glance in the other.

He constructed her. He wanted to paint a 3D picture. I do not believe he cared that she looks at you wherever you stand. That was a side effect. Because the eyes are not the main reason why we think she looks at us. It is her whole head, her whole body. He was after a stereoscopic picture. He did not get there, but what he got instead has held the world's attention for five hundred years.

Proof without shadows

That is why my study "Lisa with Hair Ribbon", done in the manner of Roy Lichtenstein, works without any shading. No sfumato, no glazes, just line and dots. You have to see it life-size, because it is about perspective and the game of band and veil, not about painterly softness.

Think different, change meaning

Did I decode a grand master, or rather society? Either way, we should start questioning things more. It is only the artist who was never one before who thinks AI could replace him. Art is something so human. Our binocular seeing and perceiving is human.

So beware. Since I learned to see this way, I can tell AI art from painted art in seconds. I recognise every AI fraud, because AI does not see binocularly, any more than cameras do. Generated images are built from photographs, so they carry the flat projection in their bones. It amuses me to walk through an academy or a gallery and decode the works made with projectors and generated images. They are always photographs in disguise.

Sven Békési, Munich, 2026

Les mères guidant la liberté. While autocracies destroy, we can create.

Fraternité

Les mères guidant la liberté. The Georgian revolution was the start. People in Tbilisi stood in the street for weeks with European flags, and watching from Munich I could not get rid of one thought: these people may feel more European than we do. We have to bring that together.

Not the flags

Yes, there are flags. But flags are not what people identify with. What held Europe together is clothing and strong women. The women who cleared the rubble after the wars. That is why on my wall it is the mothers who lead Liberty, and not the other way round.

I wanted to show that women are all the same, Russian or Ukrainian, French or Iranian. I took the images of modern revolutions, Russian ones and new ones, and united them in one picture. It is a composition of motifs that found itself.

The wall is not finished. It still has blurred places, and that is why everyone sees something of their own in it. A Ukrainian friend of mine stood in front of it and told me the story of the red ruta, the flower that blooms once a year and that you have to go looking for. How beautiful, she said. That is exactly it. She smiled.

Nothing here is self-evident

Our liberal, free values and our art are under massive threat from autocracies. Gerhard Richter and his generation came out of socialist realism and managed to make modern art feel self-evident, to free themselves from history. It is not self-evident. Art does not need a purpose, and that is a good thing. But art has power, and free artists should use that power to defend themselves.

Putin plays with images of a Russian identity. He wants to rewrite the history books, and once he has done it, he will have his worldview painted. Here the artists of liberal democracies have a head start. Autocracies can destroy. We can create something new. We are the light of the world. An artist can make pictures that others cannot see yet, and draw visions that then become reality. That is what mattered to me here.

Who owns a symbol

White flags. Red and white as the colours of Europe. Blue and yellow for Ukraine. A motif that does not burn in the fire. I want to know whom symbols belong to, who claims them for themselves, and whether a painting can take them back and put them into a shared context.

I am not interested in illustrating a political position. To say "this is the right opinion and everyone else is wrong" would be too easy for art. A picture can do something a tweet, a press release or a political statement cannot: it does not have to explain at once whose side someone is on. That tension is what interests me.

Not through galleries

I wanted to make this work big at a university, not through galleries, private exhibitions or social media. Because of who it is for. I want to reach demonstrators, former executives of German corporations and very wealthy people with the same picture. I have no appetite for a modern class struggle in the coming decade. I am trying to bring people together, and for that everyone has to move a little.

Grandfather

There is a personal line in this. My grandfather fought for freedom in Hungary. Students were shot, he had to flee, and he thought he would never see his family again. Europe was not even that free after the wall came down: he was still afraid to travel to Hungary. Oppression is bad, but it is the psychological violence that keeps us from being free. Against that you need a picture that welds people together.

When I painted this wall, Orbán was still in power. My grandfather would have cheered to see the Georgians in the street. When Hungary got a new head of government in the months that followed, I just stood in front of my picture and smiled. We may not have grasped it yet, but this is the future. Here it is, painted. This is how it will come.

Sven Békési, Munich, 2025

Series

Fraternité

Everything that belongs to the wall, in one place.