Dreaming, working, staring.
An eye on Escher’s works, an eye always at the stars.
《So let us then try to climb the mountain, not by stepping on what is below us, but to pull us up at what is above us, for my part at the stars; amen.》
M.C. Escher
My interest in Escher's works was born many years ago, I don't even remember when, but I can exactly say the day it was going to become a passion: I had passed all the exams at university and I was looking for the perfect subject of my thesis, in order to obtain the bachelor's degree (better if doing something I had interest in).
The big book on Escher's works was looking at me, blinking from the shelf; a special gift from a special person, received just a few months before. I took it, I opened it for the thousandth time. The decision was taken.
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The semiotic analysis of 22 out of his large number of works revealed a wonderful inner coherence and cohesion, emerging through and thanks to a semi-symbolic system in which the meaning comes from lights vs darks, straight lines vs rounded lines, the circular and the recursive, a dialog with the viewer vs a dialog with himself, from the very first works (self-portraits, landscapes, religious scenes) to the final ones (impossible architectures) without leaving behind the middle period (mirrors, hands) - an entire universe of meaning lying under the different and hypnotical visual surfaces.
Seen from the right point of view - Levi Strauss’s bonne distance - the entire corpus shows up not just Escher’s artistic growth but also his personal changes: by starting with a mimetic exercise (just a man who looks at things around him; realistical reproduction of Italian landscapes and places), passing throug a both mimetic and geometrical phase (Hand With Reflecting Sphere is emblematic!), to arrive to the absolute creation, the inner genius that can create universes from nothing, made of impossible structures composed with a magistral use of perspection in order to challenge all Euclidean laws.
I admire his mastery and his genius - and I obviously can't reduce my whole bachelor's thesys (or a more generical passionate discourse) in such a few lines.
What I love the most is the ability he had to create incredible strange words in which the impossible is denied in favor of the wonder and the absurd, the magical and the strange, an incredible artist nowadays famous and familiar and admired: it feels so strange that during his school years he was defined by his art teacher "too less artist".
How blind!
Today, he reached those stars he used to looking at.
