Escher's Paradoxical Universe
Escher's Paradoxical Universe
By Cesare A.X. Syjuco
Published in: The Manila Times, June 24, 1987
ILLUSION and paradox are at the heart of Maurits Escher’s quizzical renderings currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila — a deflection of “perceptible reality” into a reality no less real but decidedly less reassuring. Escher’s unique place in the history of art resides precisely in such philosophical deviations, celebrating the wit inherent in contradiction, the reconciliation of opposites, the twisting of logical parameters, all done in a hand so masterfully competent that it beguiles the mind with the sheer credibility of the nonsensical.
The paradox has always extended to the appreciation of Escher’s art itself. Like Magritte and Vasarely, Escher is both popular artist and an artist of the intelligentsia. As such, reading about his work is never nearly as much fun as seeing it for one’s self — the former recourse invariably plagued by so much incomprehensible double-talk, the latter an endless source of fascination and delight.
I remember that as a pre-adolescent (and therefore, as one yet untainted by terminology and prejudice), I found Escher to be at least as engaging as Asimov, Edgar Cayce, or even Masters & Johnson. Frequently reproduced as cheap day-glo posters, his better-known pieces were almost always as popular at Erewhon and PECO as those curlicued psychedelic monograms spelled out in four or more letters, and were even to be found tacked or pasted onto the spray-painted walls of avowed morons. Unlike much of what is passed off as art these days, Escher’s work can well be appreciated by the uninitiated. One need not be an intellectual giant to marvel at the humor and the horror of it all, the fallibility of vision and our rational faculties, the hypnotic power of the hopelessly absurd.
The MET exhibit of assorted lithographs and woodcuts on paper — while in no way as vast nor as comprehensive as I was originally led to believe — was enough, at any rate, to make my day. Escher is one artist who has actually benefited from the passing of time, the years transforming him in turn from oddball humorist to vagabond philosopher, to visionary of the first order. John Wheeler fans will undoubtedly recognize in his vast repertoire a pioneering grasp of current-day notions regarding the frailty of what we have all come to believe as unshakeable truth. “The real” and “the lie,” after all, are two sides of the same coin, and in Escher’s paradoxical universe, that coin stands balanced on its edge.
If there is a lesson to be learned from Escher’s stairs that ascend and descend at one and the same time, from his hands that draw themselves into a precarious existence, from his elfin villagers that trudge ever-onward in mock resignation, it is the lesson of ambiguous factuality. There is obviously more to survive in this age of wonder than psychedelia and the black hole. Perhaps we should begin with that lingering drudgery called logic.
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Cesare A.X. Syjuco, “Escher's Paradoxical Universe” (page 1 of 1), The Manila Times, June 24, 1987
