Shimon Edenburg ¨ Via Fractalis ¨
Shimon Edenburg
¨ Via Fractalis ¨
Photo exhibition curated by Professor Giuseppe Scaglione architect from Trento University, Italia 
Architectures Suspended Between Heaven and Fractals
It is said that architects, a bit like artists, always have their heads in the clouds!
In the case of Shimon Edenburg, architect, urban planner, artist, photographer, and visionary, this is undoubtedly true because he has had and continues to have a gaze suspended between earth and sky, to which recently, in the “in between,” he has added observation, study, and a passion for fractals.
Shimon spoke to me about this during a meeting in preparation for his exhibition, with a fascinating description that transcended the boundaries of mathematics, algebra, numbers, and calculus, to reach the conclusion that, ultimately, all of our lives are more or less “fractalized.”
It was a revelation that did not take me by surprise because, following some artistic trajectories, starting with the splendid drawings of Maurits Cornelis Escher imbued with fractals and algebraic references, I have always been intrigued by this type of expression of intelligence in which the balance between form and rule, invention and calculation, have yielded extraordinary results.
As a simple introduction, for the reader and myself, I write here that the name “fractal” may be related to a less striking property than self-similarity, a property that is nonetheless very interesting when viewed from a mathematical perspective, since those who study this type of phenomenon say that “fractals have a fractional dimension, that is, not an integral one.”
Consequently, Shimon Edenburg’s creative work is based on the consideration that fractal images are graphics that are also the result of calculations, and consequently, the fractal animations of his dreamlike and evocative images are sequences of these graphics.
But let’s move on to the images and content. Shimon is an expert architect and urban planner; he has traveled, worked, designed, and written, and thus explored different expressive worlds.
At a certain point in his career, his famous zenithal gaze began to soar over rooftops, over attics, over the suggestive and sometimes elusive relationship between sky and earth, architecture and the liquid horizon; Parisian attics seem to have captured him. In particular, I would say of Northern European cities, these particular, almost parasitic micro-architectures, located at the end of the sequence of different building floors that add up and form the “upper” part of our cities.
The transitions between building and sky have thus become the privileged starting point for an experimentation that Edenburg has been carrying out for several years and which he is constantly refining, both technically and expressively, to the point of giving it a title that has become a true ongoing investigation: “Via Fractalis Project,” through which he explores cities and architecture, urban interiors and inhabited spaces, dreams, visions, possible projects, and parallel universes.
What strikes me most about this work are a few things that particularly catch my attention, and I believe they have the same effect on any observer, even inexperienced ones. These are: the playful dimension, yet with great formal and spatial control, of the different figures and the references, even complex ones, to different currents of modern art, including video art and NET art, which may be the next frontier Shimon will be able to reach, because these “liquid” works of his are also and above all effective on our screens.
The work exhibited in this exhibition in Tel Aviv, at the Bauhaus Center space, is heavily influenced by those fugues that move between the figure and the abstract, between exploding color and controlled color, between the suggestion of a different form of “smart city” and the houses that grow in Shimon’s mind and in our daily augmented reality.
So I wonder what kind of city we live in, inhabit, and frequent: the one we see only with our eyes, or the one the works on display offer us? And since we’re talking about fractals, that is, “fractalized” images, but also recomposed, refracted images, we can decide to see everything that fascinates and intrigues us in these works, even beyond the images themselves.
Puzzles that compose revisited real landscapes, changing moons, blue, turquoise, green, and red skies, Warhol and Vitruvius, the beautiful deconstruction of the barcelonian Agbar Tower, the multiplication of mansard roofs in Paris, the black and white from which the red signs emerge, domes that expand—in short, the works of this original artist who entertains and intrigues us, taking us to other universes to discover, like a trip to the Moon or even further afield to Mars. They are complex architectures, suspended between the sky and fractals and the “wise game.” The result is so balanced between the artist and us that it almost makes us want to come and live in this suggestive reality that Edenburg offers us.
His diverse cultural backgrounds span Argentina, Israel, and Spain, and arrive in the fertile Barcelona, first as an architect and urban planner, then as a theorist, and then as an artist, without leaving any of the contemporary expressive possibilities outside his field of action.
What does this research hold for us in the future?
We don’t know, perhaps not even its author knows, but we are sure that it will undoubtedly continue to surprise us even beyond the modes of art and representation.
