Time flies. It can feel like yesterday that you were a lithe co-ed or a dewy young mother. Then suddenly, or so it seems, lines and blotches begin to appear; you skin starts to droop. “WTF?” you want to scream when you look in the mirror. But aging never happens faster than it does in the paintings of artist Sergi Cadenas.

His 3D portraits showcase the human aging process by creating the feeling of motion as you walk from the left side of the work to the right—the motion of time ticking by.

On his Instagram account, @Sergi.Cadenas, you can see a variety of young faces maturing—as well as faces turning into a different person—prompting the viewer to take on complex subjects such as the fleeting nature of youth and mortality as well as our shared humanity.

Read More: Watch This Woman Age Right Before Your Eyes

The Magic of Aging in Art

In his unique technique, Cadenas uses vertical ridges on the canvas to create two distinct images, allowing viewers to observe each subject from a different perspective. You can see that the painting is created in vertical 3D lines of some sort and surmise that the two different faces exist on opposite, angled sides of those lines. But how?

What’s particularly impressive about Cadenas’s art is that he is a self-taught artist who didn’t even become a painter until he was 30. He got the idea for his dual-image oil paintings from “flip images” he’d seen when he was a kid. He creates his works in his home studio in a small village in the Catalonia region of Spain and uses friends, family, and neighbors as models.

He fills an icing bag with painter’s paste and uses a decorator tip to create vertical relief lines.

How does he create the dual images? He fills an icing bag with painter’s paste and uses a decorator tip to create vertical relief lines with two 45-degree angles. He got the idea from watching a neighbor who was a pastry chef do his work. Then he sketches out the basic facial features with pencil before painting the different faces from the two different sides.

“You have to get used to the lines being broken and not continuous on the canvas,” Cadenas said in an interview with dw.com. But other than that, it’s like any other painting, he says. He completes one side, then completes the other.

“It’s the magic, the surprise effect that I like best,” he said.

The Response

Comments on Cadenas’s Instagram and other accounts that showcase his work have mostly been filled with awe. “Beauty fades but character remains,” one fan wrote on Instagram of a video that highlights one painting that takes a woman from childhood to old age. (We sure like this attitude!) Another sensitive commenter with a healthy “Age Boldly” mindset wrote, “Brilliant! She’s beautiful at every stage!!!”

It’s a sign for this painting to start using retinol.

Other comments are more pragmatic and tongue-in-cheek. “It’s a sign for this painting to start using retinol,” was one.

The two that we liked best are self-deprecating and sassy, which is an admirable way to face the passage of time. “I think my face also has that effect, but instead of left to right, the effect happens when you stand far away and then start walking closer.”

The other favorite: “I can do the same in the mirror in the morning. First, I have a flawless face and no wrinkles on my forehead. Then I put my glasses on.”

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