Seeing the impossible in Escher's drawings

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): Have you ever dreamed of entering an Escher drawing?

If you have, then it would have been a bizarre experience. Imagine climbing the steps of a stairway that instead leads you downstairs. Or encountering a waterfall where the water that cascades down ends up on top again.

That is the world of M.C. Escher's drawings, in which the rules of perspective are flaunted and the impossible occurs. In the drawings of this legendary Dutch artist, animals form a pattern in which they gradually become an entirely different species. He even turns angels into devils and vice versa. If you take a glance at his Belvedere, for example, and think it an ordinary drawing, look again. Each one of his works plays tricks with your eyes and boggles your mind.

Now you have the chance to marvel at the artist's ingeniousness in an exhibition of Escher's masterpieces, held by Erasmus Huis from Aug. 4 to Aug. 21, 1999. Among the exhibits, there is also a video installation showing a 20-minute documentary on Escher, which includes some of his drawings interestingly presented in animated form.

"He used a visual illusion that breaks up the reality we know," said art enthusiast Amir Sidharta. "Most artists try to depict reality as it is, to mimic it. Escher instead questions many things in that reality, and manifested it in something visually interesting."

"His work is actually surrealistic," said Wagiono Sunarto, a graphic design professor at the Jakarta Institute of the Arts. "But unlike the explosive surrealism of Dali and others, Escher's work is surrealistic in the way it transforms a certain reality into another reality. He can suddenly have a strange point of view, in the same way you can put a camera at a weird angle before taking a picture."

Maurits Cornelis Escher was born in 1898 in Leeuwarden, Holland. In 1919 he spent some time at the engineering school in Delft before moving to the School for Architectural and Decorative Arts in Haarlem. Instead of studying architecture, he studied drawing from nature and woodcutting techniques under the tutelage of the artist Jessurun de Mesquita. After graduation, he traveled around the world, and lived in Rome, Italy, where he got married and had three sons. After that, he lived in Switzerland and Belgium, before settling down in Baarn, The Netherlands.

Before 1935, Escher's work was not particularly unique compared to the work of Dutch artists of his time. Only after that year did he begin producing pieces now considered uniquely "Escherian".

In his book on Escher, art critic Bruno Ernst wrote: "The important element of his work after 1935 is precisely that he researched very specific subjects that intrigued him and then captured each new discovery that surprised and astonished him in a print, for the purpose of communicating to others his enthusiasm about these new discoveries."

In Waterfall, for example, one of his best-loved prints, the water ostensibly falls down from the top of a tower. But if we look again carefully, then we see that the waterway through which the water travels is actually a flat, one-story surface. How can this be possible?

"The nucleus of the image in Waterfall consists of three impossible triangles that are linked together," explained Ernst. "It emphatically gives us the sensation of seeing the impossible."

Sunarto finds Escher's work exceptional because of its measured quality. At a time when artists tended to be emotional, expressive or employ a softer harmony in their work, Escher turned the logic of scales and stereometry into masterpieces.

"He would begin by making some rules, on which he made his creations. Next, he twisted all the logic and rules to express himself," he said.

Sunarto said there are two aspects in an Escher drawing. One is the virtuoso craftsmanship. The second is Escher's particular philosophy, having the space in the sketch not just as a space for drawing, but as a space for reflection, a space for existence. Escher delivered his unusual concept by bringing that space further into more improbable terrain.

Escher's style and ideas became uniquely his own. Sunarto said that although his work was legendary and widely loved by his students and fellow artists, Escher is never included in any art curriculum because he doesn't represent any significant genre in art history.

"Escher has always been in a class of his own," said Sunarto. "Nobody before him did what he did, and nobody ever used his style after him."