Atlases of the ancient world. The territory that extends from my house to the Nile and to Veneto, to the Tigris in the East and across the Mediterranean to the Pillars of Hercules.
Order
Geometric order: the matrix of nature. Its use in art conceived as a metaphysical metaphor of cosmic order. The use of harmonic scales of proportion and growth gleaned from nature and aesthetic intuition, specifically the Golden Section, the Golden ("Fibonacci") Scale and the Root 5 Scale. The classical Appollonian ambition of art not to be a mirror of reality on the scale of individual human existence but as a spiritual gyroscope that counterbalances the apparent chaos in which we live with a sense of the all-encompassing universal order.
Colour
Hues not only as autonomous systems (as in Concrete art) but also as conveyors of symbolic information.
The Tel
The past accumulating into the present, presenting itself to the senses now.
Configurations spawning structures, imprinting, overprinting, recycling. Stratification as a concept.
The Pattern
The ultimate expression of geometric order. Its creative process, from the
embryonic module to its methods of reiteration, as a metaphor of all evolutionary processes. The Islamic Pattern as the supreme paradigmatic model in art. Patterns encoded in patterns, like texts and sub-texts. Patterns as the matrix for three-dimensional systems.
Architecture
The temple. The ancient concept of relatively small and relatively simple man-made scales of order as metaphorical models of cosmic order. High sophisticated integrated art, not folklore or the ingenuous. Plans, masonry, facade, wall, floor, dome, entrance, pillar, window, tower, piazza, garden, gazebo. The pyramids. Recycling.
Fragments
The whole implicit in the part (archeological technique, holography, fractals). The open possibilities in the unfinished and the incomplete.
The Receptacle
Treasure, reliquary, coffin, holy ark.
Icons
Secular. Compact, dense. Conceived and seen as through a funnel: the small magical coloured object on the otherwise bare monastic cell-wall. A magnetic focal-point, a source of radiation.
The Keystone, The Facade
The traditional supports for symbolic embellishments. Screens for sending and receiving messages.
Connections
Cross-temporal and cross-cultural affinities and empathies. For instance, fitting together an ancient Japanese or a De Stijl harmonic colour canon with a window detail from Palladio; or the Golden Scale as a computer image on a twelfth century Egyptian keystone in Sinai, partly covered with the colour of columns in Knossos.