Deborah-Valentine

Sacrae Particulae Ex Nihilo
The Inspired Visions of Gromyko Semper
Vicente-Ignacio S. de Veyra
Going across a gallery full of Gromyko Semper ink/watercolor paintings and drawings (with his few oils) can be likened to listening to early Uriah Heep or some such old progressive rock music with all their fantastic abandon and iconoclastic humor possible. But, for now, we can’t be sure if Semper is merely an intelligent humorist, a happy/hermetic fantasist or a serious iconoclast.
In his first major solo show after so many group shows, Semper falls for the title The Minotaur’s Recompense (opening October 23, 6pm, at the Kulay-Diwa Gallery of Philippine Contemporary Art, Parañaque City). Sure, the show title is a tribute to The Soothsayer’s Recompense by Giorgio de Chirico, one of the stalwarts of proto-Surrealism. But the title betrays a Semperian love/hate relationship with mythology which is precisely what the anatomy of iconoclasm consists of. For iconoclasm, w

As you may have already see on dA ...
Benoit Mandelbrot left us this weekend at the age of 85.
Here is his history...
Benoit Mandelbrot was largely responsible for the present interest in fractal geometry. He showed how fractals can occur in many different places in both mathematics and elsewhere in nature.
Mandelbrot was born in Poland in 1924 into a family with a very academic tradition. His father, however, made his living buying and selling clothes while his mother was a doctor. As a young boy, Mandelbrot was introduced to mathematics by his two uncles.
Mandelbrot's family emigrated to France in 1936 and his uncle Szolem Mandelbrojt, who was Professor of Mathematics at the Collège de France and the successor of Hadamard in this post, took responsibility for his education. In fact the influence of Szolem Mandelbrojt was both positive and negative since he was a great admirer of Hardy and Hardy's philosophy of mathematics. This brought a reaction from Mandel