“The Master of Numbers” is an Op Art photomosaic portrait of the renowned physicist, created from a collection of photographs of numbers. Each detail contributes to a visual exploration of mathematics, perception, and pattern. The project took me two years to complete, photographing numbers in the most unusual places and objects, and bringing them together into a single portrait.
And a little secret: tucked inside the mosaic is a tiny portrait of me and my wife—a fun, hidden signature and a personal touch.
Limited edition posters and prints are available through my online gallery.
A reed—sometimes called a “lamella”—is a thin strip of material that vibrates to produce sound in a musical instrument. Most woodwind reeds are cut from Arundo donax, the so-called giant cane. Take that small, stubborn sliver away and the clarinet or saxophone becomes what it truly is: a hollow tube. No tone, no music—just breath wasted in polished plumbing.
The reed looks trivial, almost laughably so. A scrap of cane shaved to a sliver. Yet it is the only part that dares to vibrate. Without that fragile defiance, the instrument stays mute.
Humanity functions in much the same way. Each of us is a reed in a colossal instrument that calls itself civilization. Frail, replaceable, easy to overlook—yet necessary.
History loves to celebrate the instrument: the grand structures, the shining mechanisms, the impressive machinery. But the sound—when it happens—always begins with a thin piece of cane trembling under pressure.
My minimalist tribute to M. C. Escher: an animated “impossible waterfall,” drawn frame by frame. It’s not exactly my usual artistic language, but I had great fun creating it, and I hope you’ll enjoy watching it as much as I enjoyed making it.
As you can see, the isometric structure links impossible angles to create a continuous water channel that appears to flow upward in a loop, falling from a high point yet seemingly returning to the top.
The “impossible waterfall,” reimagined in a lavish Rococo style, rendered as a surreal illustration for a book project.
Impossible or undecidable figures have long fascinated artists, mathematicians, and viewers alike. Their appeal lies in a delicate tension: the structure appears perfectly logical at first glance, yet closer inspection reveals spatial contradictions that cannot exist in the physical world. My latest work revisits an idea I first explored in the 1990s—an impossible Rubik’s-style cube—now developed into a new series built across several stages, from hand-drawn construction to digital refinement and photographic interpretation.
The project began with a simple geometric framework—interlocking beams arranged to suggest a stable cubic volume. The challenge was to reinterpret an apparently ordinary three-dimensional cube into an ambiguous form that still appears structurally plausible. Through careful adjustments of line weight, contrast, and directional and formal cues, the cube gradually shifts from perceived solidity to spatial uncertainty, so that as the eye moves across the image, the object quietly reorganizes itself, producing a surreal perception in place of a coherent physical structure.
Here is the original version of the project, refined from my initial hand-drawn construction and carefully reconstructed using FreeHand MX
Two of the final images belong to the Op Art tradition, where sharp black-and-white geometry emphasizes visual tension and rhythmic structure. These compositions highlight the cube’s architectural clarity while allowing the paradox to emerge naturally from the viewer’s perceptual processing. The remaining two images take a different path: they present the object in a photographic setting, rendered with realistic lighting and textures.
Together, the four images form a small visual narrative—construction, transformation, and illusion—showing how a purely conceptual structure can evolve into multiple aesthetic forms. The Op Art versions focus on perceptual mechanics, while the photographic interpretations suggest how an impossible form might inhabit the physical world, even if only in appearance.
Fine art prints and canvas editions from this series are available through my official gallery shop, where each piece is produced using archival materials designed for long-term display.
Collectors and galleries interested in larger formats or special editions may also contact me directly for availability and production details. This series continues my exploration of perceptual geometry, where simple shapes become instruments for questioning how we construct space, depth, and visual certainty.
Some say abstract art is non-representational—that it avoids visual reality and relies on color, shape, form, and gesture to trigger emotion or thought. I see it differently. Abstraction does not reject reality; it reframes it. It is a change of optics, not a disappearance of the world.
Take, for example, this video of goldfinches perched on swaying thistles. At first glance, does it not resemble an abstract painting? Rhythms, repetitions, subtle chromatic tensions, forms dissolving into movement. From there, one could push the abstraction further with the slightest shifts in shape or color—without betraying reality, only rephrasing it.
This idea is hardly new. From Cézanne’s insistence on treating nature through cylinder, sphere, and cone, to Kandinsky’s claim that abstraction reveals inner necessity rather than surface likeness, many artists and thinkers have argued that abstraction sharpens perception instead of diluting it. Even in cognitive science, perception is understood as an active construction, not a passive recording of facts.
Abstraction starts precisely there: with attention. Not with denial, not with decoration, but with the recognition that reality is already structured, already abstract, long before the artist intervenes.
I’ve always wondered about the limits of shape and color needed for us to represent or recognize an object. Take a stemmed glass, for example. To depict it, you might need just two circles and a straight line—and perhaps a red disc to suggest the wine inside.
But we can go further: by turning it from a flat image into a 3D form with a simple rotational movement, like in Duchamp’s rotoreliefs, the object suddenly comes alive in space.
All these graphic shortcuts rely on memory. Our brains interpret what we see based on past experience, filling in missing information and reconstructing the object from just a few essential cues. This process aligns with the principles of visual perception: the Gestalt laws of closure and continuity explain why we perceive a complete glass even when much of it is absent. Minimalist perception highlights how human cognition distills visual information, showing that a few simple shapes and colors are enough to evoke a rich, instantly recognizable image.
We usually perceive lines and shapes as forming a figure, while the paper and surrounding white space recede into the background. Yet, under certain conditions, what we assume to be background can itself acquire form and meaning. In the illustrations shown here, a clear geometric figure emerges—even though no lines actually define it. These visual phenomena are known as illusory figures.
What kind of 3-dimensional shape do you see?
Illusory figures depend, in part, on the presence of regular gaps within a visual arrangement. When such gaps occur, the visual system instinctively tries to resolve them into coherent forms. These gaps can be created by simple elements, such as circles. When solid black circles and partially “chipped” ones are arranged carefully, they produce striking illusory shapes.
The most familiar example is the Kanizsa triangle. Here, an illusory contour is perceived when black disks with wedge-shaped sections removed are aligned so that their edges define a triangular form in the negative space. Remarkably, this illusory region appears brighter than the surrounding page, even though its physical luminance is identical.
Kanizsa triangle
Etherial Cross
A pattern of black dots forms a ghostly ‘X’ shape through negative space. The arrangement of dots creates a subtle sense of motion and depth. The piece combines the Ouchi effect—where contrast between figure and background generates apparent movement—with the Kanizsa illusion, where the mind completes shapes that aren’t actually drawn.
Fine art prints of this Op Art piece are available for purchase through my official gallery.
The effect becomes even more dramatic when the illusion is animated. Rotate the cross, for example, and the X-shaped form—with no explicit outline—appears to emerge from a rigid grid of black dots. The shape is defined solely by subtle local distortions: small asymmetric intrusions along the contours of the X disrupt the regularity of the dots, making the form pop into perception despite having no actual boundaries.
Etherial Circle
Using the same technique, we can replace the X with a large O. Now the regular arrangement of black circles is disrupted by a ghostly central shape that seems to lift off the background, almost floating. As above, this Op Art piece combines the Ouchi effect—where the contrast between figure and background creates apparent motion—with the Kanizsa effect, where the mind completes shapes that aren’t actually drawn.
Fine art prints of this Op Art piece are available for purchase through my official gallery.
It is also interesting to add a rotational motion to this Op Art piece. I experimented with different solutions, and this one is the simplest yet striking nonetheless.
To conclude this journey into the world of contour illusions, still using black disks as our starting point, here are a few further experiments. They explore negative superpositions, translucent effects, and the emergence of more complex forms—showing how simple elements can give rise to unexpected visual structures.
Fine art prints of this Op Art piece are available for purchase through my official gallery.
What strikes in the tiny space between God’s and Adam’s fingers in the Sistine Chapel is neither mysticism nor religion—it is humanity itself. Michelangelo, perhaps without realizing it, captures a simple yet profound truth: the hardest distance to cross does not depend on strength or span, but on “human will”—or its absence.
We perceive a tension in the image: God leans forward, taut and ready to give all He can. Adam, by contrast, extends his hand half-heartedly, hesitant, the finger limp and weak. That missing centimeter seems, at first glance, to symbolize free will—or the refusal of determinism: the choice to make a tiny gesture that can shift our understanding of life, to move forward with conviction, or to remain still, waiting for everything to arrive on its own.
The fresco speaks beyond faith: to moments when we could act, yet remain still. Stillness is not failure—it is awareness. Like Wu Wei (無為) in Zen philosophy, it is effortless action: a letting go, a recognition that life flows even when we do not grasp it. Free will and determinism fade into labels, defined only by belief.
That one-centimeter gulf becomes infinite. It stretches across light-years, embodying the human condition: our extraordinary capacity to feel and aspire, in tension with the world, facing life’s trials and the inevitability of our own mortality.
I often catch myself wondering how different our art, our literature, our techniques, our architecture, our science, and all our so-called achievements would be if, at some point in history—say, right after the late Middle Ages—everything humanity had created were wiped out so thoroughly that no one could even recall what a wheel looked like. A world where no one knew whether the Venus de Milo had been a place, a painting, a wine, a poem, or perhaps an ancient weapon. And where “democracy” or “monarchy” might just as well be fireworks or seasonal mushrooms.
As for me, I suspect that the evolution of such a world would feel strangely familiar while being completely different, a kind of cosmic déjà vu. Everything reinvented, yet uncannily the same. Worn-out ideas would return with fresh paint, old opinions would resurface disguised as revelations, eccentric religions would bloom—new in appearance, ancient in essence—and intolerance would simply find new masks. I don’t imagine this world as a better one. No, not that… just the same stage with new props, perhaps a bit more entertaining.
After all, when the dinosaurs vanished in an instant, life went on—and brought forth creatures no less terrifying. Take humans, for example.
But what do you think?
Explore My World of Art, Books, and Creative Concepts
