In December 2019 Escher the movie will be at movie theatres in Europe. From its production in 2018 the movie – Escher: Het Oneinfige Zoeken – will be finally out and we had the chance to watch it before.
How do we recreate unlimited shapes that repeat themselves in a landscape? How could we catch those geometries or shadows and details that our eyes perceive as perfect inside a space?
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Escher can do it. And he does that by composing those shapes that he constantly catches around him with mathematical accuracy and an obsessive style based on the repetition of the same object. “I am not an artist. I am a mathematician”, answer Mauritz Cornelis Escher to Graham Nas, an English singer-songwriter and photographer that discover the Dutch illustrator thanks to a precious book during the end of the 60s. And he contacted him on the phone. Escher is not an artist: he is a talented illustrator that explore the human psyche and its way to sense the world. He is a meticulous observer of reality that reports into a precise style, in black and white primarily, and then in colors, inside drawings, sketches and prints in which the figures seem in perpetual movement.
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Escher is attracted to various themes and subjects: from Platonic solids, to everyday objects, to subjects as: trees, geometries, architectural elements, animals, leaves, waves, human figures, metamorphosis, mountains, chessboards, staircases, circles that enlarge themselves, and so on… Escher produces small choreographies that enter one inside the other and, through them, he gives an idea of infinite. Our eye has a particular reception when looking at Escher creations. For these reasons different inventions based on optical illusion were attribute to the illustrator.
“I am afraid there is only one person in the world who could make a good film about my prints; me”, this is the narrator preamble at the beginning of the movie that narrates Escher life and work: he depicts an intellectual character that has been working and creating for his entire lifetime, until his death in 1972. The director chose to recreate his character without an actor, he didn’t choose a fictional way to tell him, but he decided to make Escher as a witness of his time, as an outsider reporter that told us about his life and time from our time. Escher in fact, thanks to Stephen Fry’s voice, observe our contemporary times with irony and amazement towards whom still loves his works. His illustration spread worldwide.
The same world that Escher has been exploring and from which he took inspirations for his subjects, with a particular focus and love towards Italy, in particular from Tuscany and its landscapes, and then also Spain, where he fell in love with architectural decorations of Toledo and Granada. From here he took inspiration for those repeated elements that Escher drawn in visual modules that reclaim architectures and repeated signs. His work never stops. His drawings and illustrations have the illusion of always been in movement. That is why today, after his death, Escher is still shown and perpetuated.