Art Writing Exercise #1
I was immediately drawn to the mathematical nature of this work. The minimalist palette consisting of a faintly purple white and stark black lines emphasizes the interrelations between the delineated spaces rather than individual details. And what a curious interrelation. A square is subdivided into smaller squares which is further divided. It reminds me of an origami exercise that challenges you to fold a piece of paper for more than 12 times. Well you can’t, because by the 8th or 9th fold the paper has stacked up so thick and stiff that you cannot possibly bend it with your fingers anymore.
The interesting part about these squares presented above is that they are not uniform. Rather than computationally generated perfect squares, they are drawn by hand with a lot of margins for mistake. In fact, some of the squares are so imprecise as they actually skipped a line or two, towards the bottom. The hand-drawn style of this mathematical contemplation connotes a primitive environment where cave men learned about math using sticks and rocks, whose shapes are definitively not uniform. The concept underlying these lines are perfect, ideal, pure and even, whereas the execution by hand is less so. Still, the execution by hand is perfectly able to convey the “idea” of perfect geometry or even divisions. I love the leap of faith behind this.
