Mathematician and Artist Evelyne Huet
Essences, Expressions, Unity
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
An introduction to the creativity and vision of artist and mathematician Evelyne Huet in her quest for essences of existence and their varied but ultimately correlative expressions.
How can a person be both a professional mathematician, teaching in one of the world's oldest, most prestigious and most influential universities, the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, and be an artist of marked originality, her work gaining acclaim in various parts of the world?
After the demonstration of the unity of knowledge by ancient civilizations, as in the achievements of the Pythagoreans, of Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greece and the mathematicisation of reality represented by the Yoruba origin Ifa system, the arts and the sciences have too often been seen as representing different skill sets, even different mentalities, sharply divergent ways of approaching the world and of developing human potential.
With exceptions exemplified particularly powerfully by the European renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci, combining the visual imagination of art with the supposedly more ratiocinative, step by step thinking of the sciences was seen as an anomaly.
But Evelyne Huet exists to prove that something has been missing in this style of understanding reality and human creative possibility.
Image Above
This image juxtaposes the exquisitely visaged Evelyne Huet alongside one of her visualizations of the rhythms that constitute the human person and human possibility, alive with patterns of line, flows and intensities of colour, shapes and luminosities of heart, passion and action.
The contemporary Ghanaian visual and performance artist and Efa cosmologist Nyornuwofia Agorsor is an artist of mathematics, a person whose art uncovers the evocative force of mathematical symbols, their visual inspiration, unifying this with a cosmology in which mathematics becomes a springboard to cosmic voyaging in imagination and understanding, as demonstrated by her Cosmos series of paintings on Facebook.
Evelyne Huet, though a professional mathematician, operating at high levels of the global activity of the discipline, does not explicitly demonstrate her mathematical orientation in her visual art.
What she does is take us into the imaginative universe she sees as underlying mathematics and the physical, mental, social and historical universes.
Her perception operates through an imaginative eye empowered by a visual intelligence.
This imagistic awareness is actualised in spatial configurations and colour harmonies, a world of patterns, of dynamic essences, in which the present and the past are perceived in terms of forms neither definite nor ungraspable, historical but beyond history, religious and mythic and yet touching humanity in all particulars.
"What lies beyond your face?" her art asks.
"What pulses within your body?" it questions.
The rhythms of care for fellow humans, of dehumanization of human by human, of hate and courage, of love and pain, reverberate through her cycle of works, ranging deep into African and Western history to the present.
"African Queens", "Myth and Religion", "The Humans", "The Fighting", "Insanity", "Bloodshed", the titles of some of the groups of her paintings, give an idea of the scope of her scouring, of her excavation, through visual forms, of the depths and range of human possibility, the landscape generated by her digital art.
Also published on
Walks of Art blog
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