the whole truth (2025)

Solo show at Galerie Eulenspiegel, Basel. Digital prints on aluminum. A collection of fractals, generated with an iterated function system.

Images that feel both mathematically rigorous and artistically organic. Complexity arises from the repeated interplay of affine geometry, color blending, and probabilistic choice.

I became interested in the possibility of developing a mathematical model reflecting my style (my aesthetics), aiming to design a system for generating drawings similar to, or potentially indistinguishable from my hand-made work. I soon turned my attention to fractals, beginning a learning journey through self-similarity, recursion, iterated function systems, discrete-time dynamics, affine transformations, attractors (fractal limit sets), weighted probabilities, Markov chains, and the chaos game.

After experimentation, I eventually arrived at an algorithm that lets me fine-tune deterministic rules (affine contraction maps, weighted probabilities, target colors), which are then sampled randomly and applied recursively millions of times in an iterated function system. It is a parameter-driven stochastic process in which the randomness is tamed by a fixed set of deterministic quantities encoding my style.

The mathematical model, given the complete set of artistic determinants, fully explains the random variation and reproduces the observable features of my work. The beholder remains the provider of the aesthetic experience, the cognitive, subjective realm that cannot (yet?) be modeled with fidelity.