When we realize that we are faced with an illusion – an optical one, for example – the first thing to crack is our sense of reality. The shiny surface with which we cover the world becomes cloudy, the contours dissolve and a sudden astigmatism seems to veil our gaze. Everything becomes confused: white becomes black, black becomes white. What madness, one might say, to base an artistic paradigm on such vertigo! Yet, as often happens to the most lucid minds, it is precisely that darkness that can prove to be the keystone of a revolution in perception. Escher, a misunderstood artist from early 20th-century Holland, does exactly that: he confuses graphic lines to clarify the logic that orders the illusion. The exhibition hosted at the Castello Aragonese in Conversano (Bari) retraces the poetics of this visionary artist through the concepts that made him unmistakable – from geometric paradoxes to refined tessellations inspired by the Alhambra in Granada.
Maurits Cornelis Escher, “Relativity”, 1953, lithograph, 27.7 x 29.2 cm, M.C. Escher Holding Collection, The Netherlands, All M.C. Escher works © 2025 The M.C. Escher Company, The Netherlands. All rights reserved, photo courtesy Arthemisia
The exhibition gives full voice to the works, highlighting what we, inhabitants of the 21st century, tend to attribute to ourselves as our own invention: the creativity of formal rules. With the widespread diffusion of generative art and AR and VR technologies, we feel like pioneers of a revolution, forgetting the true root of inventio – from the Latin ‘to find, to discover’, not ‘to generate ex nihilo’. Formal rules – from the mathematical calculation of a physical space to the writing of a code – reveal themselves to be in surprising continuity with the creative act. Escher clearly showed that mathematics and art are not simply two sides of the same coin, but that one constitutes the condition of verifiability of the other. In his graphic constructions, mathematics is not only a tool at the service of aesthetics, but becomes the foundation of its possibility. His impossible images, tessellations and complex symmetries could not exist without a rigorous mathematical structure that guarantees their internal consistency. At the same time, the creativity typical of art is the primary driving force of the mathematician who, like a poet or painter, creates models. Finally, art enhances logical creativity by giving it visible form, weaving the fabric with which the world appears to us in everyday life.
Maurits Cornelis Escher, “Day and Night”, February 1938, woodcut, 39.1 x 67.7 cm, Maurits Collection, Italy, all M.C. Escher works © 2025 The M.C. Escher Company, The Netherlands. All rights reserved, photo courtesy Arthemisia
A manifestation of the paradox of order-dynamism and rigor-creativity, Relativity (1953) depicts three different directions of gravity: what is the ceiling for one figure is the floor or wall for another. Three irreconcilable perspectives, three alternative worlds. Works such as Relativity, Print Gallery (1956) and Waterfall (1961) are often labeled as “impossible worlds”, but Escher’s approach is the opposite: exploring the possible to its extreme limits, tracing its boundary grammar. For Escher, this limit coincides with complexity. In Day and Night (1938), for example, it arises from the repetition of a single element: not a mere iteration, but a harmonic motion based on rigor and dynamism. Contemporary aesthetics has embraced this “pleasure of return”, multiplying its variations: from the design of Pink Floyd’s most iconic vinyl records to Ikea’s advertising, to the compositions of Philip Glass. The American composer, in analogy with Escher’s poetics, builds harmonic and rhythmic structures on modular repetitions. The musical cells follow one another with minimal and gradual variations, generating a sense of hypnosis and continuous movement.
Maurits Cornelis Escher, “Print Gallery”, 1956, lithograph, 31.9 x 31.7 cm, M.C. Escher Holding Collection, The Netherlands, all M.C. Escher works © 2025 The M.C. Escher Company, The Netherlands. All rights reserved, ph. courtesy Arthemisia
As in Escher’s drawings, what at first glance appears static or simple is revealed to be in constant transformation, animated by an internal complexity that thrives on balance and change. In both cases, the viewer is called upon to pay a different kind of attention: not the kind that seeks the twist or discontinuity, but the kind that captures the subtlety of change in continuity. It is an aesthetic of logical structure, in which beauty arises from precision, symmetry and the ability to bring order to the limits of wonder. Escher’s paradoxes are embodied in our own beliefs. What we consider to be the future of aesthetics (generative art, advertising rhetoric, sound persistence) is in fact a paradoxical but coherent return to a principle that runs through the entire history of art: order, rather than stifling, frees up new perceptual possibilities.
Info:
M.C. Escher
curated by Federico Giudiceandrea
Polo Museale – Castello Conti Acquaviva D’Aragona, Conversano (BA)
28.03.25 – 28.09.25
www.arthemisia.it
Graduate in Philosophy from the University of Milan, where she currently lives, she specialized in aesthetics and contemporary criticism. Passionate of the art world and devoted to research, she believes in the potential of the interdisciplinary gaze, which intertwines critical thinking, typical of philosophical backgroud, and the communicative power of art to shape the evolving identity of its time.
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