M.C. Escher
Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898 - 1972) was a Dutch graphic artist who became one of my favorites during my adolescence. His work blends art and mathematics through fractals and geometric figures that transform into objects, as well as through the conception of impossible structures. When I began discovering Escher's work, I was fascinated by his apparent understanding of a reality that, by being impossible, is a mere construction of the imagination—an abstraction of geometry aimed at breaking the rules of forms and spaces. He is one of those painters with whom you feel a certain complicity, as though only the artist and I understood what the drawings described and no one else could understand it. When I look at his work, I see graphic representations of many ideas about the nature of reality that have made me reflect throughout my life, such as being trapped in a set of infinite cycles or being deceived by my angle of perception.
The first work that made an impact on me was "Ascending and descending", an impossible architectural structure in which a group of people climb eternally while eternally descending a staircase in a loop. You can spend a long time inspecting the drawing, looking at the corners of the staircase and wondering how the artist makes it work when it could not work in the reality we know.
Another of his most famous works, "Belvedere", is another impossible structure in which a building has two different angles at the same time. One detail I greatly enjoy in this drawing is a character in the lower-left corner holding an impossible cube. It is like an abstraction of the abstraction itself: a being conceiving an impossible figure within an already impossible universe. That character turns the drawing almost into a kind of theoretical fractal in which ideas repeat but gradually lose their essence the farther they are from the observer's view.
And speaking of fractals, the best example in this regard is his work "Smaller & Smaller", which is also astonishing and compels the viewer to look for some mistake, some figure out of place, but there is none. The intricate lizard figures are perfectly composed to create a fractal.
