Unfolding Patterns

Last summer, I was invited to participate in a group exhibition centered around the theme of cats. My initial instinct was to politely decline, as I hadn’t included people or animals in my work for many years. My focus had been exclusively on symbolic landscape paintings.
However, the exhibition’s organizer reminded me of a leopard-spot painting I had created in 1995. I had always been fond of that piece, and I began to wonder whether the aspects that intrigued me most about it could be explored further. Spots, as a decorative element, have long held a significant place in art and design. Their ornate patterning is something we instinctively recognize and freely incorporate. Yet, in fine art specifically, what makes them especially compelling is the artist’s unique, individual mode of expression.
The arrangement of patterns can reflect an artist’s inner geometry or serve as an outward expression of emotion. In my 1995 painting, Patterns, I chose leopard spots—an element from the natural world that is universally familiar—while simultaneously delving into my own personal approach to pattern formation, meticulously arranging them on a small panel surface. In doing so, the painting became more than just a study of nature; it revealed something deeply personal about myself.

For the group exhibition, I decided to revisit the exploration of leopard spots, sensing that they still held great creative potential. Coincidentally, around the time I received the invitation, I was reading The Biology of Wonder by Andreas Weber. In it, I came across a fascinating section discussing the coexistence and interplay of the personal and impersonal within natural patterns—using leopard spots as an example. Inspired by this newfound biological perspective, I was eager to incorporate it into my latest painting, Unfolding Patterns (2023).

Many regularities in nature arrange themselves. The most famous example is probably the singular order of the ice crystal’s filigree, which arises without any instruction. In organisms, too, many features are self-organising: the zebra’s stripe pattern, the leopard’s spots, the veins in a leaf, the loop design of our fingertips. None are genetically fixed or specified, but rather emerge on their own according to a certain set of initial conditions. They unfold in the same way that cells grow during their development, following certain general rules of spatial and temporal arrangement. Some delightfully complex structures can arise and develop, but only if a sufficiently large number of single building blocks is involved. The American biologist and system researcher Stuart Kauffman has explored the rules leading to this amazing self-organizing complexity. He found a seamless transition from self-arranging chemical complexity to the physiological self-construction of living organisms. The most important result of Kauffman’s explorations is the claim that the ways in which complexity organizes itself may also explain the origins of individual autonomy. Autonomy, the defining criterion of organisms, seems to emulate the inherent tendency of matter to bring forward self-sufficiency through the creation of individuals. The more highly evolved a system, the stronger its capacity to shield itself from its environment and to develop self-referential behavior focused on the maintenance of the system itself. In this fashion, self-organizing systems can insulate themselves from the volatility of the exterior world and arrange their more complex structures around the intricacies of their own interior relationships. We, therefore, could say that complex structures develop a certain self-centeredness. We could also say that mere matter already shows a first tendency to manifest its own subjectivity, broadly construed. Figuratively speaking, matter opens the door to let selfhood in.

Weber, Andreas. The Biology of Wonder: Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science (pp. 72-73). New Society Publishers. Kindle Edition.