Aiman Soliman
My graphic art features tessellations, symmetry, and visual illusions.
In my art, I explore approaches to the visual harmony of forms and
colors rooted in mathematical concepts such as symmetry,
tessellations, and group theory. My biggest inspiration came from the
music of JS Bach, particularly those compositions written in the style
of counterpoint. Bach's contrapuntal compositions depend heavily on
mathematics. However, his music does not only evoke a sense of order
but in addition a wide range of human emotions.
In this artwork, I tried to develop the visual equivalent of a
musical composition with a two-voice counterpoint. Two flocks of
tessellated quails fly into each other, and when they intersect,
they reveal a new motif (songbirds) with a different plane
symmetry. The quail tessellation is combined harmonically with a
copy of itself, which is reflected and shifted half a unit in both
x and y directions. Combining the two tessellations introduces
glide reflection axes inside the original quail motifs and
transforms the quail plane symmetry group from (p2) to the
songbird symmetry group of (pgg). The shown transformation is in
agreement with theoretical wallpaper subgroup relationships, which
were studied by mathematicians, including Coxeter.