Blind Spot
Blind Spot
The Ruler's
Blind Spot
“When everything is woven into a network that is transparent, calculable, and manageable, ‘poetic disorder’ becomes humanity’s last refuge.
We must remain wary of a modernity that is too transparent, too lucid, and devoid of shadows.”
Byung-Chul Han,
The Burnout Society/ The Expulsion of the Other
I was bad at geometry. My math was poor. Yet I ended up in urban planning and architecture, spending my days with grids and calculus. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, I swore I was done with urban design.
Then I drifted into the cities of the Global South.
Unconsciously, I began to watch. Loud streets. Irregular alleys. Poor, chaotic, yet violently alive. In those places, I found the root of my diagnosis: why I loathed neat geometry, and why I loved the chaos.
In ancient Greece, geometria meant earth-measuring. Pharaohs did not calculate triangles for truth. They did it for taxes. They measured the wheat to fill the treasury. Geometry was born as a weapon of state.
Later, it became the high wall of the elites. Plato hung a sign: "Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here." If you could not prove a theorem, you were left outside. I despised this sterile gatekeeping—
this smug arrogance that pathologizes anything it cannot formulate.
If you ask me whom I despise most, it is Le Corbusier. He said: "The straight line is the symbol of man, the curve is the shame of man." A crowd of sycophants followed him.
They took their rulers and tried to act like God.
Some call it High Modernism. I call it the obsession of the ruler. To a tyrant, readability means control. A straight line is the physical penetration of power.
In 1573, the King of Spain ordered every colonial city to be a perfect grid with a central square. Why? Because you can place a cannon in the plaza and shell every street with zero blind spots.
In 1853, Baron Haussmann tore down the winding alleys of Paris to pave straight boulevards. Why? Because of the Revolution of 1789. The citizens knew how to build barricades in the medieval creases. Geometry cleared the rebellion. It gave the cavalry an open view to kill.
Until today, history repeats this extreme order and the absolute chaos it triggers.
I am not the only one tired of it.
Now, look through these clean, die-cut geometric frames.
But look deeper.
Behind the cutouts lies the unformatted dark. These paintings under the surface were not made in one day. They are born of scratching, layering, and tearing. They are a palimpsest of time and ruins.
The lines bleed.
The shadows eat the figures.
My work is the rebellion of the unformatted fold.
It is the return of a wild, unpredictable self-organized order.
There is a crack in everything.
That is where the light gets in.
The ruler uses geometry to castrate life
— of the city, and of the individual.
Welcome to the blind spot of the ruler.
