Master of Numbers

•

My work often delves into the cognitive aspects of recognizing faces, prompting questions and discoveries. The human brain is wired to see hidden faces in many things - clouds, landscapes, and even architectural structures. This process of finding latent images within manifest ones is akin to the psychoanalytical concept of the "lost object".

As an artist, I enjoy incorporating subliminal messages or figures into my paintings, photographs, and collages, playing with the foreground and background relationship of our visual perception. Through my art, I challenge viewers to rediscover common or iconic faces hidden within the composition. "The Master of Numbers" is a unique portrait of Albert Einstein made up of 288 seemingly random photographs of numbers in a photomosaic style. To see the portrait, one needs to step back from the image. This technique is an excellent example of pareidolia, the mental process that allows us to see patterns and familiar images in random stimuli. Interestingly, there are no actual images of Einstein in the picture; it is a carefully crafted illusion that ties into Einstein's famous quote, "everything is relative," as the portrait only becomes clear from a specific distance. What adds to the portrait's intrigue is that 288 is a superfactorial, a product of consecutive factorials and a product of descending powers, as well as being a sum of ascending powers:

288 = 1! · 2! · 3! · 4! = 1⁴ · 2³ · 3² · 4¹ = 1¹ + 2² + 3³ + 4⁴

This coincidence highlights the beauty of numbers in art.