In the making of FACES….

In June this year, I launched a new collection of paintings in France. It was a terrific opening - a testament perhaps to the love affair that the French have with art. The paintings are now showing in Malaysia and Singapore and, with the help of my wonderful agent, the exhibition will travel to Korea, Shanghai, Hong Kong, India, Argentina and New York over the next year.

I remember well where my journey began with FACES. I was on holiday in New York and I had for the first time in a long while the opportunity once again to immerse myself in the genius of Salman Rushdie. A sentence in his book “Fury” had such an effect on me that I spent the rest of my vacation getting worked up about it. My wife tells me today that I turned into my insufferable introverted self on holiday.

“What is the digital equivalent of lovely, he wondered. What are the digits that encode beauty, the number-fingers that enclose, transform, transmit, decode, and somehow, in the process, fail to trap or choke the soul of it. Not because of the technology but in spite of it, beauty, that ghost, that treasure, passes undiminished through the new machines.” I was consumed by Rushdie’s use of the words ‘lovely’ and ‘number fingers’. It sparked off my initial sketches and ideas on the mathematics of beauty

My art practice has always been based on the wonder of the abstract codification of pure thought we call mathematics. I am motivated by the aesthetics of elegant mathematics now in my art as I was as a mathematician in my past. On the other hand I nurture a skeptical viewpoint on the role mathematics play as the inevitable language of choice of science and its prevalence in our lives. My art practice lies within this dialectic – in the contradiction between my two conflicting viewpoints, adopted as the determining factor in their continuing interaction.

In FACES, I confront this dialectic. I engage with my experience of the aesthetics in high level mathematics to paint faces of women that stand prominent in my visual history in the hope to question the ideas that correlate the two and the ramifications that might emanate from any tangible success in such an endeavour.

When I returned to my studio, I started working on my ideas for a new series of paintings. I knew that beauty is the motivating factor for mathematics. Truth is its goals. Mathematical truths tell us something about our reality. It can tell us something about beauty. How can I garner my experience of beauty and elegance in mathematics to explaining beauty in general? How can I do this thru my paintings?

After years of agonizing over these questions and with two intervening separate series of paintings entitled ‘Symbiosis’ and ‘source_code’, I started working on ideas stemming from subjective simplicity, fractal geometry and factor analysis to paint my FACES series. The most important idea in FACES is the purest and rarefied thought in the abstraction in relation of relationships that is coded into the mathematics behind faces. These ideas are used to build powerful and compact mathematical objects which embody the beauty in both mathematics and the faces of women I have known in my life. These are then used to construct my FACES series of paintings.

I invite my audience to view my paintings through a sieve – a sieve made of mathematical objects that pack a substantial amount of information on the way we might view beauty. I invite my viewers to engage not analytically, neither synthetically, but in a way that combines both modes and feel/intuit the correspondence in the aesthetics of the combined beauty of my mathematics and the underlying beauty of my faces.

But most of all I want my audience to evaluate mathematics and its place in our lives. Is mathematics something necessary for life as “art” and not just “fact” and does its value lie in, as Polkinghorne said, as an “abstract key which turns the lock of the physical universe”, or is it the most self-flattering, self-aggrandizing trivia game ever invented?


My paintings are beautiful paintings of beautiful people about beauty, both physical and mathematical. The suffused beauty of my paintings takes precedence over any intellectual legitimacy that I may claim for them. And perhaps the mathematical equivalent of lovely might even act as the perfect sieve to reveal a new dimension to this supreme force of human experience affecting real and lasting transformation in us. Art and maths are but languages through which we attempt to understand that which is ineffable.


- Raj (Web: www.unprimed.com
Artblog: http://sightoracle.blogspot.com )