Ⓒ 2021 Aiman Soliman

Title: The Calissons Diptych
Date: 2021
Dimensions: 32, 50 cm
Medium: Archival Digital Print

This work presents an artistic depiction of the classic Calisson geometry. The Calisson problem is about filling a hexagon space using rhombuses in the three different orientations, which are permissible by the rhombus shape. Regardless of the configuration used to pack the hexagon space with rhombuses, we will always end with an equal number of rhombuses from the three orientations. Here, I present the three orientations as a fish, a lizard, and a bird with matching edges to fill the space with no gaps. A parquet deformation transforms the motifs to 3D cubes following the intuitive proof without words of this problem suggested by David and Tomei in 1989, which is ‘unfortunately’ subject to optical illusions.