What is the essence of beauty, what is the esence of digital beauty.
These are the questions that I have put myself reviewing pictures by Macoto Murayama taken during Berlin Art Week at Positions.
I tried to figure out why they fascinated me so much. What was it? Was ist their clarity, their elegance or simplicity? Or perhaps something else? The organic and natural shapes of the flower had been processed by the artist and turned into a technical graphics. Its beauty that seemingly does not have any reference to the mathematical world achieved a new dimension.
Moreover, we wonder why it is so beautiful even though the flower seems to be derived of its organic qualities and seems to be merely a technical and digitized image electronically recorded . The contrast between what we consider to be the nature of a flower and this picture makes our mind boggle. Does the connection between science and arts expands our understanding of the world? Do we have to rethink the notion of beauty again? By being confronted with this extraodinary depiction, we feel forced to rethink our established views.
Perhaps this picture tries to explore the essence of beauty by the means of reverting its true nature? Or it is investigating its elegance attempting to get to know thoroughly, scientifically. It tries to x-ray the shape of the delicate petals and expose its inner structure as we do it while walking in the forest and touching the trees or flowers. Sometimes destroying their structure, sometimes smothing their suface, as we were touching the face of the beloved person.
The Vitrivian Man by da Vinci is about human body, human anatomy and its proportions. But it is above all about mathematics and geometry. The human body served here as an ideal geometric model for architecture.
Vitruvius who was the inspration for this picture said ‘For any building to be beautiful it must have perfect symmetry and proportions like those found in nature’, thus, resulted in Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
‘Man is the model of the world’ da Vinci
The perfection of symetry of propotions were then the measure of beauty in the renesainse time. We can however come across quite different examples of beauty. Here we see an old grandfather with his grandson. The disfigured features of grandfather´s face don´t seem to repel the little boy. The vision of the little boy has not yet been scathed by the societal norms of what is beautifl and what is ugly.
The eyes of the grandfather and of the grandson are filled with deepest love and care. The emotional connection between these two figures explains the essance of the beauty of human nature.
Grandfather And Grandson By Domenico Ghirlandaio