Samuel Verbiese

Statement

Besides expressionistic painting and sculpting of the figure and portrait, I am recurrently drawn to geometric projects, probably because my previous experience in engineering. This year I would like to present a small 3D work assembled two years ago by stacking my collection of little pluggable anthropomorphic plastic parts designed in 1986 by Belgian artist and friend Paul Gonze after Leonardo's Vitruvian man to help the NGO "Îles de Paix", founded in Belgium by Nobel Prize Father Dominique Pire, to trigger social fundrasing for emerging countries. This material is being used extensively by Emeritus Professor of Mathematics Francis Buekenhout of the Université libre de Bruxelles and colleagues as an educational mathematical tool.

Artworks

The modules are typically built fully symmetrically in their plane with their five vertices (head and hands aligned in opposition of feet with same 2.1cm distance between head and hands as between feet, and twice, 4.2cm, between same side hand and foot) acting as male/female 1cm diameter circular connectors all M on one side of the plane and hence F at the other. Yet, for a while some years ago, modules were produced with several possible connector arrangements, as I discovered when trying to stack all of them, now 101, by colors. 11 of them, belong to these odd species (orange or blue) and I succeeded in making a crowning branched Peace loop with 10 of them, the 11th, sporting all M/M's, bridging it to the tower of 90, that rests on M's.