“Concinnitas” was a term used by 15th-century scholar and architect Leon Battista Alberti to describe beauty in architecture, which he believed existed when — and only when — parts of a building cohered to a harmonizing whole. It was also used to name The Concinnitas Portfolio, to which Professor Pau Atela responded in his Re(Creations) and MathStudio. Both the portfolio and Atela’s work will be displayed at the University Museum of Contemporary Art at UMass until Dec. 9.
Mathematical expressions from The Concinnitas Portfolio, comprised of ten expressions a group of mathematicians and physicists found the most beautiful, hung in frames alongside Atela’s work. They were drawn out in white on a chalkboard-black background; brief explanations accompanied them. Longer ones could be found in a binder nearby, though they didn’t really help me understand the expressions they described. My mind has always been stubbornly shut to math. Past a certain point, formulas dissolve into abstraction. The jumble of symbols feeling to me so distant from the phenomena they describe that they might as well mean nothing — they certainly aren’t beautiful.
I turned from these frames to Atela’s Re(Creations). There were his “Five Platonic Solids,” a tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron, rendered in clear acrylic.
I also watched three videos. The first showed The Botafumeiro, a thurible in the Santiago de Compostela that swung back and forth across the cathedral, pouring thick clouds of smoke over the pilgrims who made it there; the second two videos showed pendulums tracing whorls of ink over paper or snow.
After this, I went to the MathStudio, an immersive space (you take off your shoes and pad around in the blue socks they give you) filled with various geometric figures constructed out of straws, wood, string and cardboard, as well as a raw potato hanging from the ceiling. I then returned to the remainder Re(Creations), where some of Atela’s work as an artist and not as a mathematician — as cleanly as you can separate the two — hung. Twice he painted his family’s farm in Reus: the first depiction small and white; the second larger, the sunlight thick and buttery. He sketched his dog, Goya, on a paper bag. He drew a girl he nearly adopted, but didn’t.
If Atela meant, in his response to The Concinnitas Portfolio, to provide more widely legible proof for the portfolio’s thesis — that beauty could be found in math — he certainly succeeded. Appreciating the beauty in the formulas of The Concinnitas Portfolio felt like trying to appreciate the beauty of a butterfly deadened, dried, set in glass and accompanied by a latinate label: fascinating for an entomologist, yes, but not for someone only used to seeing butterflies take flight in life.
Atela never denies the life from which he derives his mathematical expressions. His videos shake with an unsteady hand; rubber bands and flags of tape keep together the figures in his MathStudio. The almost unfinished quality of his work can seem jarring, especially if you come to the work with nervous ideas about math’s stiff, unforgiving perfection. But this imperfection invites curiosity rather than intimidating and repulsing it, and this approach demonstrates how Atela’s experience as a teacher bleeds into his life as an artist.
In one respect, however, the exhibit could have been more finished. The disparate parts of Re(Creations) — the solids, the videos and the drawings and paintings — didn’t resolve themselves into a coherent vision. Certain choruses, spirals and pendulums did repeat, but repetition alone doesn’t harmonize a body of work. His “Platonic Solids” felt generic in light of his more personal artwork; his more personal work didn’t support the thesis of the exhibit: that beauty does appear in math. And when one of the oldest concepts supporting his thesis is that of a kind of proportional harmony, it feels remiss not to actively pursue it. But this is a finicky, particular concern. Overall, his exhibit succeeds at what it sets out to do, and draws out beauty from math.
