A few of the temples have striations of identical color to the aperture. In Temple of the Neon Red, 1984, and Temple of the Radiant Yellow, 1985, the compressed lines flanking the color apertures take on the appearance of reflected light, as if a brilliant stream of light was entering from the far end of a portico. Anuszkiewicz had observed such light in the Valley of the Kings. Many of the works in this series are assertive, almost aggressive in their physical presence.⁸²

Some have blue or black apertures and lines that evoke the strong colors of Egyptian tomb paintings. When the approach is not optical, the intentions are constructivist: the artist shows that his color fields are as timeless, tensile and solid as the monuments of antiquity.

Translumina - Paintings, Reliefs and Sculptures: 1986-2001

"I sometimes refer to my painting as architectural, because I work out my plan, I work out my idea, and then I go about constructing the painting."⁸³ The Temple series reignited the artist's involvement with three-dimensional works. In the interval between his important exhibitions in 1984 and 1986, while Anuszkiewicz was still constructing Temples, he began to realize striated columns in large scale wood constructions in low relief. These shaped constructions, which he entitled Translumina, break out of the rectangular format to compose a variety of new shapes like crosses, triangles, rainbows and stars.

In 1988, John Russell wrote in The New York Times, "in the new work, trompe l'oeil columnar forms are disposed sequentially, one on top of the other, as if each were rotating at an angle of 45 degrees to the others. Each functions, in terms of its relation to the whole and in the terms of the rather acid colors that Mr Anuszkiewicz knows so well how to handle. The effect has a cumulative steadiness and openness that this visitor found very impressive."⁸⁴ Relief paintings, like Grand Midnight Palace, 1989, are limited to two colors, often black and one other color, painted in bands on thin alternating, raised and lowered, wood surfaces. For critic Barry Schwabsky in Art in America, "They are bolder and, from the standpoint of color, simpler than his paintings had been since the early sixties."⁸⁵

As the Translumina series developed, it became evident that these works are concerned with illusions of transparency rather than color transfer. Around 1989, the aggressive physicality of the relief paintings gave way to a remarkable involvement with the kind of dematerialization present in the work of the early 70s. These freestanding constructions of basic geometry are rectangles with square ends. Three such open boxes are deployed to form an equilateral triangle in Translumina — Transparent Triangle of Yellow, Red and Blue, 1990. "What a shock to find," writes Schwabsky these "skeletons of his paintings... stripped of the coloristic splendour which had seemed to be the paintings' very essence, [yet] these bones can live"⁸⁶ It has the purity of an early Sol Lewitt with several pieces missing. By a curious coincidence, Anuszkiewicz evolved into geometric white sculptures at the same time that Sol Lewitt was introducing parallel bands of color into his wall paintings. "Color in Anuszkiewicz's sculpture is used more to distinguish one form from another, than, as in his paintings, to emphasize its sensual properties."⁸⁷

Anuszkiewicz continues to refine his aesthetic. In 1990 he evolved a form of sculpture in two dimensions, essentially, that resemble colored drawings in the air. Laser cut from half-inch thick sheets of aluminium or steel, they have no welded points and seem to defy gravity as they cantilever into space. Most of them painted in a singular primary color, They have the stripped down economy of a great master's Alrestil.

These pieces occupy a single plane, expanding illusionistically into three. Intersecting Red, 1994, shows two identical trapezoids with their centers pierced by a line.