Art as Invention: Sherban Epuré in Memoriam

Over three years ago, Letiţia Bucur shared the devastating news with me: Sherban Epuré, her husband, suffered a spinal aneurysm. It meant, among other things, paralysis from the waist down and a never-ending succession of medical interventions. The artist was not prepared to give in. Living on borrowed time, he fully rededicated himself to his art.

Before emigrating to the United States in 1980—a rather difficult endeavor—he lived under the authoritarian regime of communist Romania. Not a few of his friends and relatives experienced the hell we associate with dictatorships. "If it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger" was the bon mot of those days. Those who opposed the suppression of freedom—including the freedom of artistic expression—either were censored or found refuge in forms that made it more difficult for the censorship apparatus and the secret police to detect. Epuré, together with some of his friends, followed this path. The "new Barbizon of the young painting in Romania"—as a critic, Ion Frunzetti, described it in 1974—discovered a superb corner of nature: Poiana Mărului (in English, "Apple Meadow"). There, they painted the village in a manner that qualifies, in retrospect, as aesthetic dissidence. Nothing idyllic, as the regime would have had it, but rather taking a subjective perspective, an aesthetic different from the official socialist realism. Maybe Epuré was less "at home" in the group of figurative painters or was already seeking his own language. But in spirit, he animated the resistance. Thrown out, for political reasons, of the Bucharest Polytechnic where he was studying, Epuré bore within himself a dedication to geometry that eventually changed his life. (At the same institute and at the same time, while I was studying electronics and computers, my own investigations into aesthetics began [1].) Our professor of cybernetics was Edmond Nicolau, a histrionic character who probably envied us for taking the liberty of seeking refuge in aesthetic issues. One of his articles on art and cybernetics (1974) was illustrated with an image by Epuré. (Later, we found out to our disappointment, that, like many others whom we trusted, he was also on the payroll of the secret services.)

For Epuré, science became the backbone of his art. It took him little effort to abandon figurative art and fully dedicate himself to the aesthetics of abstract forms. In order to explain what happened, let me recall Mondrian, for whom painting landscapes was a step toward his abstractions. (Neoplasticism is the art-history label attached to his compositions.) Epuré abstracted from the landscape the expressivity of primal drawings. The same inspired the art of peasants, creating in the language of weaving a miraculous new world. Two articles published during that time in Romania (in Arta, the journal of the Union of Painters) explained the process in detail. He introduced the notion of Mathematical Realism: "The drawing is the outcome of the life record of the point navigating in space" [2]. What counts is the "experience of happiness brought by the discovery" [3]. Moreover: "The object is a pretext, a catalyst in expressing an idea" [4]. I hope that those who are interested in Epuré's art will one day translate the two texts, which belong to the vast library of writings about the relation between art and mathematics that accompanied the work of artists seduced by new technology: among them, Ileana Bratu, Mihai Jalobeanu, Francis Goebés, Florian Maxa, Solomon Marcus and me.

There is as much art in mathematics as there is mathematics in art. Polykleitos conceived the perfect male nude by ascertaining a ratio (1:√2) that endured until the "divine proportion" advanced by Luca Pacioli—an artist and mathematician—extended as far as in Leonardo da Vinci's images. But nobody needs a rehashing of this narrative, which became almost trivial once automated mathematics—i.e. the computer—entered the stage of human activity, aesthetic activity included. Does Epuré deserve a place in this narrative? The question cannot be taken lightly. So many distinguished artists embraced mathematics via computers that the issue of legitimacy is almost irrelevant. A new aesthetics, or many...