Big Bang

It is not a great surprise to find that Luminet is a co-author, with Marc Lachièzé-Rey, of Celestial Treasury: From the Music of the Spheres to the Conquest of Space (Cambridge University Press, 2001), in which such Renaissance luminaries as Kepler and the German artist Albrecht Dürer are given their due. More unexpected are Luminet’s activities as an artist and as a published poet. Moreover, he has collaborated with the composer Gérard Grisey on a piece of cosmic music, Le Noir de l’Etoile.

Luminet’s characteristic lithograph, Big Bang, shown here, exploits the spatial vocabulary of
perspective to evoke realms beyond the three dimensional. Whereas Escher relied on contradictions and oscillating ambiguity in his graphic art, Luminet suggests plunging, interpenetrating and vertiginous illogicalities of dynamic space. Spewing from the Big Bang in the top left-hand corner, matter organizes itself into structures on the right; the tumbling dice on the left imply irreversible disorganization arising from chance.