Geometry of a Multidimensional Universe: Weightless Art and the Painting of the Void

1. MIT, art, and science

A.P.:

One of your formative stages as an artist was when you attended MIT. Arriving at MIT, at the Center for Advanced Visual Arts and the surrounding campus, was for you like arriving at a huge source of discovery, invention, science and technology, mathematics, geometry, but also a place with machines, computers, improbable experiments, all in a physical and practical manner that you could take advantage of and use. I think that left its mark on you and guided your intellectual and artistic development.

Was the MIT you found there decisive for you?

Did you find there the meeting point of technology, art, and science?

J.M.Y.:

When I went as a Research Fellow to the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, I felt immensely privileged and a combination of feelings and emotions that the well-known poem by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer expresses and which I can’t resist quoting:

Hoy la tierra y los cielos me sonríen,

hoy llega al fondo de mi alma el sol,

hoy la he visto …, la he visto y me ha mirado …,

¡Hoy creo en Dios!

(Today the earth and sky are smiling on me,

Today the sun has touched my soul,

Today I have seen her and she has looked at me.

Today, I believe in God!)

A.P.:

There’s a good metaphor for that mood you wish to express in the comment of an MIT student’s hack (Fire Hydrant Water Fountain) on display in the Stata Center building, next to the Forbes Café.¹ It says: “Getting an Education from MIT is like taking a drink from a Fire Hose.”

J.M.Y.:

Really? I didn’t know that. When I was there, the new Frank Gehry CSAIL building had not yet been built. Anyway, it wasn’t actually there where I discovered that meeting point that you mentioned between art and technology. It started with my participation in the creation, in 1967, in Valencia of the Antes del Arte group, which proposed reestablishing and updating a dialogue between the state of science at that moment and the basic “artistic theory” of those days.

We didn’t then consider sciences as an abstract notion but as an arsenal of new data, methodologies, and strategies, essential to the understanding of human communication and most of all art. We hoped to overcome certain anachronisms and several of the more irrational aspects of creativity. We understood that intuition, the emotions, sensitivity, and the ineffable nature of art had to begin where the proven and experienced ended.

They were the processes involved before considering a work of art as Art, those that were of interest to us, at the same time as we tried to assimilate the very latest technology available to us to exemplify those ideas. I built various mobile, luminous artifacts using lasers and also industrial materials, electric motors, and other things.

My stay at MIT was a natural move to make. Of course, being in the most important scientific-technological university in the world was a tremendous leap for me, opening up so many possibilities for understanding the universe of knowledge.

It was perhaps the most important stage of my life as far as learning is concerned.

A.P.:

Do you think that the current interaction between people in the digital world and the Internet world, now deployed all over the world, is different from those past times, before digitalization?

J.M.Y.:

The Internet, as everybody knows, extends our access enormously and at the speed of light to a multitude of options and choices. Knowledge is just one of them. The vast amount of information now available presents a problem for the mind, but a very welcome one!

2. Geometry and its absence

A.P.:

When we analyze the development of your work, it’s clear there are various grand stages. At MIT you developed your “sky art,” crossing tornadoes with the first lasers that science and technology at MIT provided you with, then you went on to ethereal flying structures, like that huge and brilliant octahedron that was floating for a number of days over the Venice Biennial in defiance of gravity, then to impossible geometries, and finally you have arrived at your present work, in which you oscillate between the painting of emptiness and that of horizons and eclipses, where there are no clear forms and where geometry and form are apparent more from their absence than by their presence.²

What do you remember of that development?

J.M.Y.:

I’ve never abandoned those notions related to the shapes of what we call geometry, which for me is a kind of mental field that permeates everything and is the basis and sustenance of my approach to reality. For example, space. The idea of space has changed so much for humanity, and for me also, over the last century.

In my work, I have never tried to illustrate an idea but rather to flow with it through painting in order to understand, or feel, access to that reality with love, passion, and “sentient” (emotional) knowledge, as Zubiri would say.

That idea of space (and geometry is an extraordinary conceptual tool for understanding it) has been and continues to be central to my artistic thinking, as the means to approach such classical questions as “Who are we?,” “Where are we?,” “Where did we come from?,” and “Where are we going?” Painting and its basic expressive elements of form, light, color, space, time, surface, texture, auditory sensations, and so forth make up a language with which I try to gain access to an understanding of what those questions mean to me.

But there’s a lot more. The more we question, the more complex things become, as illustrated by the famous response of Augustine of Hippo to the question, what is time?

“If you don’t ask me, I know. If you ask me, I don’t know.”

I’d say that’s a very artistic answer. The response of art to reality is of a similar kind. It ends up being a kind of “enlightenment” that weighs us down, fills us up in a very special way, and escapes all scientific analysis. It is not as if we haven’t tried. In the 1960s at the Madrid Centro de Cálculo we tried to apply mathematical formulas to attain the maximum degree of aestheticism in a work of art. We based our research on, among other things, the ideas of the law of the mathematician Birkhoff, of Gestalt theory, whose formula contemplates:

Or his laws of prägnanz:

“One form will be all the more prägnanz, the greater the number of axes it possesses.”

From there, I moved on to Impossible Structures, where in some ways I was trying to break our perceptive experience by creating a certain sensorial versus meaning conflict, so as to catch a glimpse of a new way of conceiving space as a multidimensional body.

The flying structures ³ that I began at MIT in 1975 followed that attempt to establish several “attractors” of the attention, this time in the sky, that would lead us on to intuit different ways of contemplating space-time, the surrounding reality flowing with other more complex and exciting realities. Some of these structures, capable of flying, were a reflection on different hyperpolyhedrons.

Later the geometries of fractals and the ideas of quantum physics led me to “dilute” the classical forms of polygons and polyhedrons to arrive at the notion of emptiness, the infinite, the “transinfinite,” the origin and end, the possible starting point of everything. Or, as the writer Marguerite Yourcenar asked herself:

“Quoi? L’Éternité.”⁴

Astronomy has always interested me as the sublime backdrop to immense, ancestral knowledge. We human beings look to the stars when we ask ourselves who we are. There, possibly, we will find the answer. But it is not the questions or the answers that most interest me in this process of my own life but the possibility of flowing with nature by accepting that we are part of it. For me, perhaps, the most complex and intense possibility is becoming aware of the universe.

3. On the metaphysics of art and Mark Rothko

A.P.:

You’ve just said that painting is your “specific medium.” I know that one of the most important references of contemporary art at present is the painting of Mark Rothko. There’s a sentence in a famous letter to the New York Times, written by Adolph Gottlieb and Rothko in 1943, that reads: “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing.”⁵

Rothko also said, “Pictures must be miraculous.”⁶

What attracts you to the painting and philosophy of Mark Rothko?

J.M.Y.:

Mark Rothko produced essential painting, of a superior order—even sacred, if I may say so.

It is for me a source of continuous discovery, a kind of door that, on opening, offers us the mystery of everything, that imagined unified theory that scientists look for with such determination. His paintings are “attractors,” places of meditation, culminating in the Rothko Chapel in Houston, perhaps the most ambitious undertaking of the artist.⁷ It was officially opened in 1971, just one year after the death of the painter, so he never lived to see it completed. He didn’t think that certain works should end up in museums. His own work he preferred to see in relatively small places, without interferences, such as old churches that could be reused as places of art. The combination of those works, situated in an octagonal space, envelops the spectator in an atmosphere of mystery and serious, profound emotion. For me the high degree of spirituality, devotion, and personal enlightenment is similar to that experienced in another great space of a similar kind, the Ryōan-ji in Kyoto, a Zen garden of the fifteenth century that provokes similar aesthetic and spiritual tensions. It is a not a very big space. Its rectangular shape contains fifteen rocks surrounded by a small circle of moss on a fine gravel floor that is raked every day. From any point on the rectangular perimeter there is always one rock that remains hidden. The important thing is the intense, almost physical shock you feel on entering it. In both cases, you feel a metaphysical vibration, feel immersed in the transcendental, in Rothko’s paintings and in the Ryōan-ji.

Art “happens,” as James Abbott McNeill Whistler said. The miracle happens and as such lends itself poorly to description or interpretation. It’s emotional knowledge, living poetry, therefore. The cultured and precise philosophy of the painter, although providing us with the keys to understanding, in no way gets near to real pure contemplation faced with his work.

The North American painting of the era in which Mark Rothko lived, especially around World War II, was influenced by Oriental art and spirituality, the idea that emptiness is not empty but the origin of everything.

4. Beauty ≠ truth

A.P.:

José María, I would like you to reflect on the relationship between beauty and truth. I am sure you will remember Keats’s famous aphorism, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.”⁸

Some artists, you among them, also defend minimalism, the idea expressed in the famous phrase that Mies van der Rohe adopted from the Robert Browning poem, “Andrea del Sarto” (“The Faultless Painter”): “Less is more.” However, not everyone agrees with that.

There’s an article by the English science writer Philip Ball, on whose web page one can read: “Beauty is truth? There’s a false equation.”⁹ Ball provides weighty arguments to back up the equation that crowns his essay: “Beauty ≠ truth.”

In the text he quotes the debate between Niels Bohr and Einstein:

That was Einstein all over. As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr commented at the time, [Einstein] was a little too fond of telling God what to do. But this wasn’t sheer arrogance, nor parental pride in his theory. The reason Einstein felt general relativity must be right is that it was too beautiful a theory to be wrong.

Ball attempts to refute John Keats’s statement and, by doing so, involves science and is helped by the growing complexity of the theories of quantum physics and cosmological physics. According to Ball, “The gravest offenders in this attempted redefinition of beauty are, of course, the physicists.” For him, the beauty of art and that of science must be on separate pages. He states that science and art should not try to come up with a “united search for beauty.” He concludes his argument with the sentence: “Beauty, unlike truth or nature, is something we make ourselves.”

What do you think of Ball’s refutation of Keats’s statement?

Do you think that the quoted equation that Ball proposes makes sense? And given that the art you have made has always had some relationship with science, I think it is only logical to ask for your opinion on whether art and science should seek a united search for beauty or not.

What do you think of the separation he proposes?

J.M.Y.:

Truth has been represented in the history of art fundamentally as a beautiful female nude. There are many works in the history of painting to prove it. The famous painting of Sandro Botticelli, The Calumny of Apelles, is just one example. It is allegorical: a female figure pointing heavenward represents naked and beautiful Truth. She approaches the action, where there appears a judge with the ears of an ass, King Midas, who is positioned between Suspicion and Ignorance. Other figures represent Envy, Anger, Calumny, and so on. Next to the figure of Penitence is Truth, who will triumph in that description represented in the painting.

In the history of art, we can also find the myth of a woman accused of a crime that she didn’t commit, whose defending counsel undresses her in front of the court. The court declares her innocent, so impressed are the judges by her beauty. Beauty and truth are considered in the Greek aesthetic ideal as one and are also linked to other qualities, such as the just and good.

The astronomer Johannes Kepler came up with a “beautiful” but erroneous theory on the marvelous proportion between the heavenly spheres, the movements of the planets and their circular orbits contained in the five platonic solids. The model of the Solar System he proposed in his work at the end of the sixteenth century, Mysterium Cosmographicum, I admire for its beauty, not for its scientific truth. It inspired me to make a series of variant sculptures from that model. Later Kepler corrected himself in his work Astronomia Nova after realizing that the planets’ orbits describe ellipses. In a way, this great genius of astronomy accepted defeat by showing that those orbits were not actually circles, which were considered to be the simplest and most perfect figures.

To me as a painter, Kepler was fascinating because of his expressive and poetic force, which I feel can be found in the depth of his scientific work.

The idea of beauty has varied enormously for humans over the ages. The consideration of what is beautiful and also, I’m sure, of truth depends on different epochs and cultures.

However, contrary to what Ball says, there are very serious attempts to understand the unique constants of assimilating beauty as a single common denominator for all civilizations and for all time.

For me that equation, beauty ≠ truth, is a little off the mark. I experience art deep down inside, and to paraphrase the painter Barnett Newman, in the same way that birds know nothing of ornithology, artists should not speculate too much on aesthetics.

5. Order versus chaos

A.P.:

Saul Bellow, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, said in an interview:

The first time I opened my eyes to the world, I had the impression that it was enslaved to the ideas of order, which are useless in every sense. More basic than all of this is the singularity of the point of view.¹⁰

José María, making use of Bellow’s statement, could you explain to me from which point of view you tackle the chaos/order dichotomy?

Are order and chaos reconcilable in a single work of art?

J.M.Y.:

The artistic generation prior to the one I belong to were abstract expressionists, followers of expressive immediacy, Jackson Pollock being one of its leading lights.

I tried to assimilate the concept of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, which indicates the degree of molecular disorder of a system, as it can be applied to the theory of information, art—or at least it seems so to me—together with the principles of uncertainty, chance theory, turbulence, and fluid mechanics.

However, as I advanced, I came to understand that Douglas Hofstadter was right when he said: “It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a façade of order and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.”¹¹ Order and disorder, regularity and irregularity complement and contradict each other or come together in harmony in a work of art. I fully agree with what Hofstadter said because of what I have experienced as a painter in terms of the structural variables in an artistic composition, in which geometric formations, such as Sirpinsky curves or the concept of Benoit Mandelbrot’s fractals, intervene, where chaos becomes orderly geometry.

We managed to incorporate these notions into the project of some paintings, like those of Pollock and some other artists of apparently radical compositional attitude, such as Piet Mondrian, where it is clear that chance and chaos partly determine the paintings of the former and the cosmos, proportional harmony, is what we perceive in the latter. Or if we consider the case in the sense of order of the famous painting of Rafael, The School of Athens, with its projective regularities.

My undertakings as a painter have always been conscious of that dichotomy, and I have used it to try to reach new degrees of aesthetic and expressive complexity, in the same way as chiaroscuro or complementary colors are used.

7. On the void

A.P.:

José María, your relationship with emptiness is a long one. I remember hearing a journalist at a press conference remark “the painter of the void,” almost certainly because your exhibitions in Barcelona and Zaragoza in 2003 were called On the Sublime Void and your 2009 exhibition at the Galería Rafael Ortiz in Seville was called The Absent Space.

In art, as you know, there have been revolutionaries who have investigated different forms of artistic “void” (conceptually speaking): the void in painting (Kazimir Malevich’s White on White), the entirely black canvas (Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings), the absence of color (Li Yuan-Chi’s Monochromatic White Painting, Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing) and the void in music (John Cage and his composition 4′33″): silence as the absence of the music that the listener expects to hear.

Why does emptiness interest you? What is it for you?

In art, is nothing the same as emptiness?

And can you paint the void? And if so, how do you do it?

J.M.Y.:

The idea of understanding, or rather practicing, the notion of emptiness occurred to me as a result of the constant that I employ, not as neglect but of “less is more,” which has been naturally projected right from my very first works.

The Zen gardens were, without my being aware of it at that time, my first real contact with Oriental art, which I came to truly admire. The Spanish painter Zobel was a great expert on Oriental art and I learned a lot from him, including the notion of the void.

As a minimalist practice, the principles of Zen aesthetics attracted me immediately. Some of those principles are asymmetry, austerity, liveliness, spontaneity, essentialness, meditation, serenity … and the sum of them all, emptiness. The object in this type of art is not understood as something finite, enclosed in its own limits, but as something that is gradually constituting itself all the time, completing itself, losing itself and recovering itself within the rhythms and vibrations of a universe in endless production.

Of course, I’m talking in metaphorical, poetic terms. But I prefer painting it than talking about it. I’m not developing artistic formulas that are more or less exotic, imprecise or scientific, and so on. I speak from the emotional experience of a painter whose reality moves him and teaches him in parallel with other forms of knowledge, including the symbolic and the spiritual.

“Nothing” and “emptiness” are terms I and other artists use indistinctly for the same thing, or we differentiate between them, in some cases, to understand each other better. Emptiness is everything; nothing is nothing.

Returning to my art masters, I think that for Malevich, the Black Square painting represented the supremacy of pure sensitivity in the visual arts. It gravitated on white, which means nothing. It was a concept that reflected to a certain extent its time, when mechanistic ideas still prevailed, with the notion that solid and indestructible particles were moving in the void.

Cage, closer to our times, was strongly influenced by Zen. His inspirational character was Buddha. He studied Oriental thought on the void, on silence, with D. T. Suzuki. He expressed that in the piece you mention: 4′ 33″, in a very radical way. He is also considered a precursor to assuming whatever noise as a part of music. In the case of this piece, for example, the noise was that of the audience, or the sounds coming from outside the hall. I am a whole-hearted admirer of Cage. I met him at MIT and, although rather slow-wittedly, I did manage to learn something from his teachings.

A.P.:

José María, let’s talk now of the void according to current quantum physics:

The energy of point zero is in physics the lowest energy that a quantum mechanics physical system can possess, and is the energy of the fundamental state of the system. The concept of zero point energy was put forward by Albert Einstein and Otto Stern in 1913 and was at first called “residual energy.”¹² In quantum field theory, it is a synonym for the energy of the void, or dark energy, an amount of energy that is associated with the emptiness of the void space. In cosmology, the energy of the void is taken as the basis for the cosmological constant.

All of this that appears so abstract we can perhaps express by saying that for the present quantum physicist, the void is not nothing, for in the void, the aforementioned residual energy exists.

However, these things may be closer than we think. On the experimental level, zero point energy creates the Casimir effect (or Casimir-Polder force). This is the best-known mechanical effect of the fluctuations in the void and has something to do with how well or not the micromachines that we use every day function, for example the accelerometers of the iPhone that allow the content of the screen to change between vertical and horizontal when the smart phone is turned.

Perhaps, José María, a good metaphor for these phenomena would be some of your paintings that a critic classified as the “painting of the void.”

Maybe the void of your paintings in reality is like a quantum void because within their vibrating colors there is perhaps a dark energy like that the present physicists are talking about, a probable cause of the emotion that one feels on contemplating them closely.

What do you think about this metaphor as far as your paintings are concerned?

J.M.Y.:

Your metaphor seems suitable and very interesting to me. The idea of the void was for me a natural continuation of the notion of space, basic for a painter who, in preferring classical mechanics, considered the void as something in which solid and indestructible particles move.

The space of a Renaissance painting is a scene that the painter constructed with his perspectives, with one or two points of view and geometric compositions, including canonical ones, following preestablished orders, almost compulsory, of the objects, landscapes, individuals who peopled that scene, subject to proportions, such as the golden ratio, for example.

The idea of space changed radically with Einstein’s theories, which associated gravitational fields and spatial geometry. This change became even more pronounced with the combination of the theory of relativity and quantum fields, where the subatomic particles are no longer so “solid and indestructible.” They are considered as mere condensations of the field and dilute in some way on interacting with the space surrounding them.

Space is no longer a passive void. This void is now recognized as a dynamic “entity” crossed by forces of great importance.

In art, these considerations all filter through to artists. They are notions of our times that we must incorporate into the pictorial space, as we too try to capture reality. Picasso, a great innovator of spatial relationships with cubism, never dared to make the leap from figuration to abstraction (what we call abstract art). In parallel, something similar took place with Einstein, who never accepted the theories of quantum mechanics of Bohr and Heisenberg. Both artistic abstraction and quantum physics do not require “representation.” It is as absurd to ask oneself what the White on White painting represents as it is to ask oneself, in quantum mechanics, what the electron looks like.

Among my proposals is, I suppose, the exploration of the void as an approach to essential reality, perhaps a mystic reality like that found in the Oriental thought we were talking about and that considers the ultimate reality to be emptiness. They call it so because, for that vision, it is the essence of all forms and the source of all life.

I approach multispatial theories, quantum physics, superstring theories, multiverse theory, and so on, with awe and respect. Even the mysticism that we mentioned and that I assume, I try to understand. I study them as basic concepts, as well as their projection in my painting, faced with the fascination for the void, for space-time as cardinal expressive elements, obviously together with others, such as form, light, and color in plastic arts, and most important of all, their relationship and transcendental significance for the flow of humanity.

8. Science, art, and scientific reductionism

A.P.:

Jonah Lehrer in his book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, offers various statements on the relationship between art and science, which I would like to ask you about:¹³

“What science forgets is that this isn’t how we experience the world. (We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.) It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.”

“Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural”

“There is a presence in what is missing. That presence is our own.”

Moreover, Lehrer says that the artist describes what the scientist cannot describe and that a comprehensive description of the functioning of the brain demands both cultures: that of art and that of science.

He also says that art is not reducible to physics and to time, that it is impossible to understand art without taking into consideration its relationship with science, and therefore, in our times, art is “a counterweight to the glories and excesses of scientific reductionism.”

What do you think of that?

J.M.Y.:

I don’t believe that science overlooks the ultimate reality, which, clearly, cannot be reached. I prefer to think that the tools for finding truth through the knowledge and technology that science uses are not the most appropriate ones for the task. However, part of science, especially stemming from the findings of quantum physics and the contradictions and new enigmas posed regarding the experimental observation of noted phenomena, is narrowing the gap between science and certain conclusions from the world of philosophy and even the spiritual.

Indefinite yet existential, art provides us with experiences that are in the end little understood by science. For me, however, art has always been a form of knowledge.

I think it’s clear that there is a new attitude on the part of science, or of certain scientists who are trying to explore apparently observable fact, where consciousness may affect physical phenomena.

I fully agree that art needs science and science needs art. Both fields I understand as something more than disciplines. They are a coherent part of our cognitive and emotional capabilities. Art and science display, in every case, parallelisms, concomitances, and convergences, but also divergences and ruptures. All of them, individually and collectively, I see as expressive elements that constitute a fascinating “hyperpicture,” perhaps overflowing with the multiverses that we form part of.

Science itself, with all its realism, also seems to me, without trying to mystify it, a miracle, as is art, as is everything. If not, how else can it be understood when science seems to be getting closer to a total understanding of the universe and its immutable laws? These inexorably have to change or evolve. Now we find we have learned to know that we know “less,” at the same time as we confess to knowing only 5 percent of the total energy and matter of the universe that is observable with current technology.

Obviously, I’m speaking in terms of “beliefs.” It couldn’t be otherwise from my position as painter and with a very different education from that of a scientist. Finally, I do agree with what Lehrer says about our plural identity. Possibly, truth should not strictly be the final aim of thought.

A.P.:

Thank you, José María. It’s been great talking to you.

J.M.Y.:

My pleasure and a privilege for me.

33 Geometry of a Multidimensional Universe: Weightless Art and the Painting of the Void

1. MIT, art, and science

2. Geometry and its absence

3. On the metaphysics of art and Mark Rothko

4. Beauty ≠ truth

5. Order versus chaos

6. Time: Changing the past

7. On the void

8. Science, art, and scientific reductionism

Notes