The Bucharest Municipality Museum invites you to the exhibition titled “Signs and symbols – Apophenic visions in the fractalic realm”, open at the Dr. Nicolae Minovici Museum – The Conference Hall, between November 26th 2016 and May 28th 2017, fromWednesday to Sunday, between 10h00 and 18h00 (ticket office closes at 17h00). The Museum is located at No. 1 Dr. Nicolae Minovici Street.
Hidden with discretion, Dan Dermengiu’s sensitive side was perceived only by a closed group of initiates, to whom he opened up timidly on several unique occasions.
Those who gained access to the intimate universe of his soul, to this side of his very little known, discovered the fascinating world infinitely created by fractals that open up generously and continuously provided there is no human interference.
The geometric rationale of Dan Dermengiu’s fractals turned into shapes filled with mystic light, a light beyond words and images, which he marked with his encyclopaedic mind, as seen in the description of his paintings and the titles he chose for his works.
Behinds the finite image lies the perpetual process of searching for colour and dividing them at the point where they were fragmented (fractal – fracture) – from the moment he felt was alive and a source for aesthetic messages.
The classic definition of the fractal can be found in the images of Dan Dermnegiu – “the fine, irregular structure”. The shapes seem identical no matter the level of magnification. They are, as can be observed in the present exhibition, infinitely complex.
This mysterious image extrapolated by fractals can be detected in natural patterns – in networks of rivers and in the circulatory system for instance.
The mathematics behind fractals appeared during the 17th century. During the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century, mathematicians signalled the existence of exceptional geometric entities, without any resemblance to the figures and bodies which had been studied until then. Among these we mention Koch’s curve, a curve of infinite length that borders a finite area and that doesn’t allow tangency at any of its points, and the Hausdorff dimension, a geometrical object that does not have a complete dimension.
In 1872 a function emerged whose graphic is nowadays considered fractal, when Karl Weierstrass provided the example of a continuous but undifferentiated function. In 1904 Helge von Koch, unsatisfied with Weierstrass’ abstract and analytical definition, provided a geometric definition for a similar function, today called Koch’s snowflake. In 1915 Wacław Sierpiński built the triangle, and, a year later, Sierpiński’s carpet. Originally these geometric fractals were described as being curves rather than two-dimensional, as they are considered today. The idea of self-similar curves was taken on by Paul Pierre Lévy, who, in his work “Plane or Space Curves and Surfaces Consisting of Parts Similar to the Whole”, published in 1938, described a new fractal curve – the Lévy C curve.
The functions iterated in the complex plane were investigated towards the late 19th century and early 20th century by Henri Poincaré, Felix Klein, Pierre Fatou and Gaston Julia.
In nature there are no simple, regular geometric shapes, but shapes which are highly complex and unique. From this observation a new branch of science was formed, tasked with studying these complex shapes, called fractal geometry. These new complex mathematics came as an answer to the questions that Dan Dermengiu, as an artist this time, began to raise permanently with the first drawings he produced as a child, intuiting, searching for that nucleus that can be fragmented infinitely without leading to dissolution, despite fractal geometry playing its own part in the theory of chaos.
From the moment this science revealed itself to Dan Dermengiu, he perceived it as the sole art form that would allow expression on a higher level, profound until dissolution, the only way to integrate chaos in a relative world order.
Lena Dermengiu