Gisèle De Meur (GDM)
After 30 years of mathematics research and teaching social sciences students, I now pursue my 'GDM' visual artist life creating, amongst other things 'mathart' works. A domain I enjoyed to lead in & explore, as curator of « Art&Math » exhibitions in Brussels (in 2014 at the Université libre de Bruxelles, and more recently, in 2016/2, in the Uccle Art House)'.
From a series of «Tributes to M.C.Escher » composed for this recent exhibition, this work illustrates, with a background of Escher’s research notes on tesselations, a geometrical concept alien to the general public: 'The Affine Plane with 9 Points'. This "strange 'plane', other world of dimension 2" indeed, belongs to 'finite' or 'discrete' geometries. (To be continued below)
(Cont'd) These geometries treating spaces possessing only a finite number of points, whose curves are no longer characterized by a continuous 'trace' ('without lifting the pencil'), but merely by enouncing their constitutive points. The set of its 9 points is structured by straight lines distributed in 4 directions, each with 3 parallel lines.
Here we see 9 square framed works (the 9 'points' of this plane) forming a square; on an original Escher manuscript in the background, each work displays a 4 cats motif in a rotation symmetry 4. The cats' colors placement help visualize the 4 series of 3 straight parallel lines between each other, which join the 'points' by packs of 3 ('verticals', 'horizontals' and 'obliques' of 2 types).