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Space Time with M.C. Escher and R. Buckminster Fuller
Victor Acevedo
Photo by Milica Polovina
This document presents a range of selected material that spans Acevedo’s use of traditional and digital
media from 1980 to 2001. This material particularly corresponds to the chapters in his article dealing
with tessellated overlay, polygons to polyhedra and of course, computer graphics.
Victor at the British Museum, 30 May, 2001
Victor Acevedo has shown his work in over 80 exhibitions worldwide including Silent
Motion at the Colville Place gallery, London, 2001; Podgallery NYC 2000 and 1999;
SIGGRAPH 98; Homage to M.C. Escher at the Escher Centennial Congress in Rome,
Italy 1998; NY Digital Salon 1996 & 1994, ISEA 1993, and Prix Ars Electronica 1991.
In 1999, his piece called The Lacemaker was featured in the ACM/SIGGRAPH documentary "The Story of Computer Graphics. " Later that year, Acevedo’s work was
included in the exhibition celebrating the 20th anniversary of EZTV/CyberSpace which
was held at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. Acevedo currently resides in
New York City where he lectures on digital fine art at the School of Visual Arts.
Originally from Los Angeles, California, Acevedo began drawing spontaneously at the
age of four. As a young adult, he studied formally at Art Center College of Design.
Influenced by M.C. Escher, Salvador Dali, and R. Buckminster Fuller, he produced a
significant body of work in traditional media, primarily painting and drawing during the
years 1977-1985. He made his last oil painting in 1984, and adopted computer graphics
as his primary medium. Acevedo’s ongoing interest in geometrical structure, periodic
space division and polyhedra has continued to be an integral part of his digital work.
Acevedo can be currently contacted at acevedo4@earthlink.net
All images herein Copyright 2001 Victor Acevedo
F1 - A rarely seen color study of Four-fold Rotational Wasp - Acevedo, 1980 guache on cardboard
F2 - Slated Breakfast... Detail of a randomized color tessellation study, 1981 guache on paper on masonite
SLATED BREAKFAST - VISCERAL ANALYTIC
The two images on the previous page (F1 & F2) show examples of my experiments with
coloring open packed zoomorphic tessellation in a somewhat randomized manner--a bit of
chaos with an underlying order. In November 1980 while still at Art Center College of
Design, I completed a pencil drawing called Slated Breakfast--Visceral Analytic. In the
spring of the following year, I began painting a large 4 x 6 foot version of this same subject. It was based on this photograph I saw of two secretaries having lunch on a park
bench in a 1964 National Geographic magazine. My figures are stylized and the surrounding landscape has been replaced with a non-objective modernist environment. Regarding
the title, Slated Breakfast refers to a meal that is scheduled, or pre-planned. This picture is
intuitive, from the gut and it has an analytical component as well--visceral-analytic.
At the time, I had this notion of bringing Escher’s zoomorphics into the domain of easel
painting, using the patterns as a metaphor for the metaphysical channel that is operative
in any given scene. I thought those animal forms would look good at large scale. I also
thought I might make a series of large oil paintings, but I never did--this is the only
one. Later on in the Summer of 1981, still not complete with the motif of the two
woman, I painted the 16x20version seen below as well as a variant called Sad Voyeur
Watching Orthogonal Womanhood, which I wrote about in the book.
F3 - Slated Breakfast--Visceral Analytic - Acevedo, 1981 - 16x20 oil on canvas
MACRO SIZED SYNAPSE
In September 1982, I was beginning to think more about triangulation. My drawing called Macro Synapse -Cuboctahedron Periphery utilizes graphical effects which were inspired by the work of R. Buckminster Fuller.
Based on a photo I took of uniformed school children in Japan 1980, this image ties together three different spatial domains and puts them together on a perspectival ground. The image is cohered by various subdivisions of its underlying perspective, as well as its method of shading, which refers to Picasso. On the
left, the figures are interpenetrated by a planar network that grows out of an articulation of the two-point
perspectival scaffold by several cuboctahedral domains. In the middle is the relatively flat orthographic
tetrahedron, variously subdivided into smaller octahedra which are divided further still, back into tetrahedra. Like a raw kaleidoscopic peripheral refraction of the scene, on the right is an open-packed array of
larger cuboctahedra, texture-mapped with expressively calligraphic iterations of the protagonist--this is
the boy in the center feeding the deer with a cubist head. The grouping of small children is rendered intentionally as a systemic whole. The almost sacramental wafer transfer from child to calf is the sensorially
scaled, macro or medio-cosmic synapse.
F4 - Macro Synapse-Cuboctahedron Periphery - Acevedo, September 1982 12x21.25 " graphite on paper
VOID MATRIX
In March 1983, pre-dating the building of my wooden octet-truss model by a month or two was the drawing
called Void Matrix Lattice. Taking the device first introduced in Synapse a bit further, it also combined figuration with an environment built up from an IVM or octet truss spatial subdivison of its perspectival grid. It
was influenced by Escher’s perspectival pun found in his print called Relativity. Another idea graphically
embedded in this work is the notion that the Renaissance perspective projection system is a polyhedral construct itself. For example, imagine a 4-point perspective -- it’s a tetrahedron.
In 1984, I wrote a poem-like description of this image. Here it is, in an updated form. Best described as an
inventory of implications: a child is having an out of body experience. Tetra-vertexia, space-frame in convergent-divergent parallels contain vectorial cartographic pockets of equilibria resonance. In the time it takes for
the young child to turn his head...there appears an apparition of himself with Daddy in extra-corporeal suspension. On the chair, an older boy (in a pose inspired from Dali’s painting Sun-table)sees it too....however nonsimultaneous, refracted to a different position in space, less clear and tetra-inscribed. All in the three point relativity of up or down or as Fuller would say, in or out.
F5 - Void Matrix Lattice - Acevedo, 1983 16.75 x 19.5" graphite on paper
TELL ME THE TRUTH
The piece called Tell Me the Truth (F6) had several inspirations, most notably Escher’s
print Stars.While the cage in Escher’s print is formed by interlocked octahedra, a triacontahedron serves this function in my work. My friend, geometer David Koski, helped me
build it as a 3D computer graphic model on the PC based Cubicomp. Truth..is about my
older brother, David Acevedo, an excellent artist in his own right, who tragically succumbed to brain cancer in 1986. Truth...began by combining two digitized photos, one of
David and another of a few friends sitting around a table in front of my large 1981 oil
painting called Slated Breakfast - Visceral Analytic. The composite image includes computer graphic artifacts like "wire-frame debris" and "brush strokes" using the software’s
rectangular fill feature. I even kept in the accidental data slur (seen at the bottom of the
picture) as part of the final composition; this happened when saving a version to a hard
drive that was too full to accommodate all the new data. Before Photoshop, in the middle
and late 80s the computer painting software of choice was TIPS Targa. This is what I used
on this image, to bridge the photograph and the 3D model.
F6 - Tell Me the Truth - Acevedo, 1990 various sizes, computer graphic
F7 - The Violinist - Acevedo, 1996 various sizes, computer graphic
F8 - 4D Memory Cluster - Acevedo,Spring 2000 various sizes, computer graphic
4D MEMORY CLUSTERS
Using a space-frame produced early in 1996 with a 3D modeling computer program
called Softimage, The Violinist (F7) is from the first group of works that began my
New York City period. The picture is a visualization of sound architecture as generated in real-time by a musician.
4D Memory Cluster (F8) is a metaphor for a recollected memory, clustered and precessed down from 11 dimensions. The notion here is that a memory is like a
momentary random access holographic constellation hovering in the potentially eternal flow of mind. A sphere texture-mapped with a cropped photograph is the centerpiece of this composition which features a network of contiguous octahedral
domains. Most of the domains are nucleated with a mirror-like ray-traced surface.
The photographic sample is from a picture of my father Nick Acevedo in a park, in
Orense Spain, August 1983. This photograph was also used for an early work called
2 Philosophers (1988) and the more recent 4D Flux in the Park. Usually my working method is to embed computer generated structures into a photographic space, in
this case it’s the other way around.
NuCynthesis_detail MC1 (F9) and Eric in Orense (F10) are portraits that I created in
the Summer of 2001. Consistent with my use of the isotropic vector matrix (IVM) to
provide a phenomenological glimpse of the underlying field, these images convey the
interconnectedness of figure-ground and illustrate special case perturbations of an
event’s local energetic substrate.
F9 - NuCynthesis_detail MC1 - Acevedo, Summer 2001 various sizes, computer graphic
F10 - Eric in Orense - Acevedo Summer 2001, various sizes, computer graphic
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