"Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze, but it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures; without these, it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth."
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Galileo wrote these words in The Assayer in 1623, amid a controversy about comets with a Jesuit mathematician. Despite their declared hostility and despite the Inquisition, which would later confine Galileo to his villa in Florence, both science and faith sought to reveal a design, a hidden order of creation. This quest for the structure or grammar of the world has been pursued by thinkers, theologians, artists, and scientists. Such is the case with mathematician Roger Penrose and his tilings, discovered almost serendipitously in the 1970s, where every finite portion of the tiling repeats infinitely, with a structure that turned out to be that of quasicrystals.

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The encounter of these interweavings with the photography and sensitivity of Fleur Thesmar and Nicolas Sultan paved the way for The Penrose Project, an exploration of the invisible patterns that traverse and structure faces and landscapes, which the Project brings to light, subtly resonating with mystical architectures.

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For centuries, mysticism has blended the concealment and revelation of the hidden plan of creation, aware of both the allure and the danger of bringing these divine patterns to light. Just as Galileo discerned, divine creation is understood as a text and as a language. This is also outlined in one of the earliest treatises of Jewish mysticism, The Book of Creation(Sefer Yetzirah), composed between the second and eighth centuries CE. Attributed to the patriarch Abraham, this brief text describes the formation of the world from the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and their combinations, as well as the ten sephirot, these conduits or intersections through which divine emanations can continually find their way to this created world, a creation that is perpetually being accomplished. Altogether, there are thirty-two paths to wisdom.

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The ten sephirot are sometimes represented as spheres connected by columns; they correspond to divine qualities (prudence, victory, beauty, judgment...) but also to materiality—such as the ten fingers of the hands or feet, in a materiality as strange as it is necessary: because the divine manifests in a physical and material dimension, humanity and the world gain a metaphysical dimension. This cosmology results in an ongoing exchange, a dynamic between the divine and the human, the energy from above descending to earth before ascending back to the divine, described as endless, in an unbroken interdependence.

To represent these emanations, the sephirot have been arranged in what is called the Tree of Life, which some have then mapped onto the human body, that of the first man, Adam, the Adam Kadmon—the primordial Adam, encountered in Kabbalah, Christian Gnosticism, and even in Hegel's works, and which demonstrates our shared humanity. Against those who seek to fracture humanity into races or ethnicities, this Adam, traversed by divine emanations, symbolizes a shared essence and is our common ancestor.

 

Examining faces through the Penrose tilings recalls this Kabbalistic symbolism, this structure beyond the precious singularities of beings. Getting lost in the mystery of these faces, captured in these tilings, is also to see the sephirot that give each person their measure of humanity and transcendence.

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Undoubtedly, discerning the underlying structures of the world comes with its perils. Mystical traditions warn of the danger of attempting to organize and decipher everything, the hubris of knowledge, even if it is cloaked in fervent mathematical formulas. This is the case with the scholar Max Cohen in Darren Aronofsky's film Pi, a genius who tries to bend the world to his Kabbalistic equations. The Penrose Project, on the other hand, reveals the lines of the tilings drawn on the portraits and landscapes in subtlety, not as frameworks but as vanishing lines: they suggest rather than impose. The trees and faces, woven into the Penrose tilings, are both fragile and eternal.

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In the Sefer Kuzari, medieval poet and theologian Judah Halevi reflects on the meaning of the Book of Creation, on the significance of the desire to reveal the structure of the world: the idea is to give humanity the ability to understand the unity and omnipotence of God and His creation, whose multiple dimensions are but an illusion to conceal divine unity. Mysticism is a language that allows one to pierce the veils of the world, but other idioms can be used to access its facets, such as philosophy. Then, these emanations and this primordial Adam take on another meaning, a philosophical creed, that of unity in diversity, a faith in the possibility of harmony.

 

Contemporary to Galileo, Johannes Kepler devoted a treatise to these links between the material and the spiritual, marrying in his writings astrology, astronomy, music, and geometry, and in his Harmonies of the World, some tilings resemble those of Penrose. One only needs to apply their tracery to the images that surround and inhabit us for a delicate harmony to emerge from our chaos.