SEARCH AND SPOT

Ljungkvist follows up Search and Spot: Animals (2015) with a bevy of vehicles to spot amid fleets of planes, boats, cars, buses, and other ways of going.

Even Waldo isn’t better hidden, as the rank after rank of tiny, fine-lined shapes and narrow bands of color on each spread offer dizzying challenges to even the most practiced young eyes. The tallies of what to look for within each bewildering visual maze are likewise exhausting—one spread, for instance, conceals “10 helicopters, 10 hot air balloons, 8 airplanes with one propeller, and 6 planes that have 2 propellers.” Elsewhere, on one spread, diverse shapes including “6 green things that you would pedal” overlap to create a jumble of lines and colors, and on another, among 78 multihued and identically shaped bicycles on a page are seven with a particular sequence of colors on their thin wheels and bodies. In four cases text in large circular frames is placed over the patterns rather than to the side, leaving many vehicles or items only partially visible.

Neat as the visual patterns are, their excruciatingly fine-grained complexity is likely to cause more frustration than pleasure, even in obsessive types.