
"Heliotrope"
"May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything brought into proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed toward a central point."
- From Cezanne's letter to Emile Bernard (1904)
If, as Cézanne supposed, volumes in the natural world combine spheres, cylinders, and cones, then one good way to spot the difference between a human scape and a natural one is to look for lines and volumes that do not fit this description: human spaces, it turns out, are chiefly rectilinear affairs characterized by sharp angles rather than soft contours.
When the German photographer Ernst Haas first moved to New York City, he was first thrown off, he recalls, by "all the horizontals and the verticals, but no circles." Just so.
TITLE - "Heliotrope"
WHERE - Airport facade, San Diego, California (2021)