I. Proportional Theology: Redemption as Myth
We have always had a thing for order. Maybe it’s a survival, maybe it’s the vanity of the human mind, maybe it’s that quiet fear that if we stop arranging things, the whole world will collapse into a mush. The search for meaning makes us crave patterns. When it comes to beauty, vulnerability longs for it to play by rules, not by chance. So it’s tempting to throw in a magic number: 1.618 (the Golden Ratio), take a curve, christen it a Fibonacci Spiral, and start to call things divine.
Sure, the math checks out, selectively. But what we have constructed around that is more faith than math. We want symmetry to matter. A secret engineer must have drawn up the blueprints to beauty before us, we want to believe. That hope can transform geometry into gospel and numbers into amulets. At some point, we decided that if only we could consistently trace these perfect shapes with our fingers or climb up to their heights with our feet, somehow, we’d escape decay and the common meat of each other’s bodies.
The Fibonacci Spiral
Pythagoras referred to it as the music of the spheres. Plato said perfect form. The Renaissance? God, obviously. But the Golden Ratio existed long before the Italian mathematician Leonardo Bonacci of Pisa (Fibonacci) introduced the sequence to Western Europe, via its publication in his book Liber Abaci (1202 CE).
Versions of the sequence showed up in Indian mathematics, for example, as early as 200 BCE to 600 CE, where the sequence describes long and short syllables in verse.
In many ways, order is how we self-soothe. If only we could focus completely on the beauty in the natural world. How long can that occupation deter the mind from confronting death? How wonderful could that be? If every spiral was a prayer that life operates by design, and there is a plan, and perhaps beauty might distract us from it, and disorder will not inevitably conquer good.
Every generation repaints the same hunger afresh, in hopes that a tidy ratio would somehow spare us from mess. We observe everything from a seashell to a galaxy, and we whisper “See! Evidence! Beauty has rules.” But even rules erode. Every perfect curve, when carried through time, begins to buckle under its own logic. Somewhere between evidence and projection, we trace lines through randomness because we can’t face the alternative, that beauty does not matter beyond our perception of it.
It’s understandable, with busy minds, that our madness for proportion graduated from observing repeating patterns in nature, to then gain legs and thrive in constructing things. Geometry departed the seashells for mastering stone and virtue. If nature suggested divine order, we took it as our job to assist the process.
What started as a belief in natural harmony became something directed inward. If the cosmos could be brought to heel by number, maybe so too could the body. The tongue of stars turned to flesh, so that geometry was made the flesh’s grammar.
Leonardo da Vinci’s The Mona Lisa
(Strictly speaking, a true golden spiral is a logarithmic spiral in which the growth factor is φ; many ‘Fibonacci spirals’ approximate this.)
The Taj Mahal. Shashidhar S
II. The Flesh of Architecture and the Scaffolding of Manhood
Around the 5th century BCE, the Greeks struck symmetry into their temples so their fear of the gods would not feel out of place. The human body became a microcosm of order, where good measurement was proximity to virtue and nudity stood as a symbol of power, pleasure and decadence. Centuries later, Rome conquered Greece, but also absorbed Greek culture wholesale. The Greek ideal of symmetry and proportion flowed directly into Roman art and buildings before symmetry was made administrative. It became faith and fear with a floor plan. Proportion was folded into empire: columns for law, arches for conquest, façades for faith. When Christianity took hold, that same architectural order was repurposed for salvation.
Vitruvius, Rome’s great theorist of design, wrote that a building should mirror the human body, balanced, measured and whole. Temples and Forums across all continents displayed that moral geometry, dressing Roman conquest as harmony and the faith that a city could be made immortal through symmetry and logical design. Order as propaganda carved into every arch.
For a moment, symmetry felt like God was paying attention. You could walk into a church and think that the world was properly aligned. Architecture complemented civilisation’s therapy sessions. Chaos banished to make space for formalism. Separating a culture from neighbouring Barbarians my promoting a higher state of ornamental living beyond scarcity.
That transition effectively ended the classical phase of bodily idealism and began the millennia-long tension between flesh and faith.
The West was not the sole carver of ideals. Egypt had already sketched its bodies on grids as early as 3000 BCE, though they looked to the stars, their symmetry was more concerned with cosmic balance than vanity. India danced its gods through attractive, impossible postures and classical art flourished during the 4th-6th and 9th-13th centuries CE. Beauty as energy and rhythm, not ratio. Japan had already expressed love for imperfection, just as a cracked bowl can catch sunlight, as early as the Muromachi to Edo period of 10th-17th century CE, and the Islamic world chose abstraction over anatomy, turning pattern itself into devotion as early as the 7th century CE.
From the 5th – 15th centuries, geometry aligned with prayer. The body vanished, and the divine stood before them. Cathedrals, temples, mosques and mandalas in stone. Architecture rose from chapel to the clouds. Order no longer flattered man; it served God. Ratios were recited like psalms, evidence that the universe could still be talked into symmetry. In the trefoil knots of Celtic art and in the tessellations of Islamic tiling, math became a kind of worship, an architecture of awe. Whether or not the golden ratio genuinely informed these designs is almost beside the point. Faith required a pattern, and a pattern was made its proof.
Not satisfied in stopping at walls and domes, having learned that one could build perfection, we cast the same measuring eye upon ourselves once more. If the cathedrals were God’s body in stone, why should ours not try to measure up?
While φ is a precise mathematical constant (φ = (1+√5)/2), many of its alleged appearances in nature and art are approximate, contested, or retrospective. See e.g., studies showing human body ratios vary widely. Plus Maths.
Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam
The Renaissance Revival of the 14th -17th century CE nurtured the likes of Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci who were both enthralled to the Vitruvian idea that buildings should embody the proportions of human bodies. Michelangelo’s David stood less as a statue and more like a manifesto. Michelangelo’s accuracy was not only technical but also philosophical. He treated the flesh as architecture, geometry come to life. It became the model for a new kind of order, one in which architecture, anatomy and nature at last spoke a common tongue of humanism. The Renaissance had a template in meat.
Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man
The statue of David is calm and composed. Marble virtue-signalling. Yet even he needed editing beyond the creator’s precision. When David was revealed, moralists later clamoured for the genitals to be cloaked with a copper fig leaf so they could admire mastery and maintain decorum by avoiding truth. The perfect proportions of beauty celebrated, but not that much. Western art had long eroticised the female nude while sanitising the male one, granting men the role of the observer but rarely the observed. Representation in mastery of the flesh was approved, as long as the flesh didn’t acknowledge it was living. A construction of manhood designed for excellence but to represent restraint. A manual for dampening internal warmth, through centuries of establishing perfection, only to cover it up when moral scaffolding began to rattle, and every jolt felt like sin or very much like sexual freedom.
Michelangelo’s statue of David
Entire cultures built traditions around the human body, worshipping its image while pretending not to see it naked. Power could exist in symbolism, but not the raw honesty of the skin. Where symmetry of the human body became less about geometric ideals and increasingly about conformity, far removed from chippings of a marble man trying not to sweat. And centuries later, the same instincts would find new disguises: the gym mirror, the magazine cover, the phone camera.
Today, we are in the age of exposure, but the body has never felt more policed. The Greeks revered it; the Victorians censored it; we have monetised it. We call it empowerment now, but the geometry has not gone anywhere; it just rebranded itself as wellness. Health overtook holiness; calorie counts superseded commandments. Body shaming lurks beneath the guise of “fitness” and so too does body positivity. In theory it, offer acceptance yet still bends beneath approval. We see glory in diversity, but the algorithm are quietly busy culling for perfection of at least one metric. Disability is often only celebrated when it’s displaying resilience. Even nakedness, the most natural condition of all, still blushes under the ring light.
Pornography pretends to liberate us, but it’s just the latest myth of symmetry taken to bed for pay with skin unshackled by blemish, stamina that makes no clatter in the act itself, no fumbling breath between bodies. It transforms desire into data, it standardises hunger into product. We scroll, and judge, we swipe and we call it connection. The screen is the new temple, and each of us is praying to its reflection. Even now, the body is a grid, but the lines are digital.
Boo! By Daniel Jaems.
Black window Frame.
Boo! and a Collapse of Geometry
Introducing Daniel Jaems’ photographic series ‘Boo!’
It’s mostly air and silence, the picture, some fabric, a mass is darkness like the abyss of black on black Rothko; light so softly revealing intimacy. At first blush, it’s about restraint, minimal, clean even reverent. But travel down with your eye and the calm starts to vibrate.
Beneath those creases lurks the ghost of the Fibonacci spiral, hidden as an in-joke known only to his most mathematically devout fans (a hairline, if you look close enough). Your eye follows the curve because it has been trained to. You hope for harmony, but you receive tension. The cloth grabs, the light slides, and beauty and astonishment are suddenly nose to nose, pretending not to ogle.
And then, the body. Not flaunted. Offered. The head of a penis, bordered like a mystery, meant to remain invisible. It is tender and defiant in equal measure, dignity and defiance squeezed into the same square inch.
Photography loves its symmetry; Boo! teases with that. The black silk ripens into etiquette, a visual “Excuse me” that for the moment keeps things civil even as something raw hums beneath. That hum is the whole point. It’s geometry giving up control. The viewer’s eye b-lines to the tension in the fabric, which is the precise location where beauty and shock lean into each other.
This is not provocation for its own sake. It’s exposure as philosophy. Boo! reveals how much we desire to make sense of everything, and how human it is when that control is tested, or disintegrates.
IV. The Joke, the Collectable and the Morality of Being Hypocrites
The game is clear from its title! Boo! Half joke, half dare, half admission of guilt. Grinning across the room, as if it knows precisely what you’re thinking. The jolt isn’t the body; it’s the laugh. That low, involuntary half-scandalised, half-delighted laugh that people make when they haven’t decided if they are offended.
In art, humour is the final recourse of the safe rebellion. Duchamp had his urinal. Cattelan had smashed a meteor into the Pope. Manzoni literally canned himself. Boo! enlists in the club of trading shock for wit. Its mischief wrapped in velvet.
Boo! By Daniel Jaems.
Walnut window Frame.
The humour isn’t simple either. Who’s the punchline: the artist, the sitter or the viewer? Everyone, probably. The photo both honours its subject and pokes fun at the concept of order. It’s hijacking the language of fine art, perfect lighting, elegant composition, whilst using that to present something nakedly obscene and alive. Shock becomes décor. It turns out the price tag does what morality could not: it sanitises. The collector is purchasing rebellion pre-framed, secure and signed in limited edition. Possession becomes confession. To hang Boo! is to acknowledge that you warm your virtue just a bit.
Beneath the funny stuff is something more substantial. The ache of Bacon painted, the precision of Mapplethorpe sculpted. The war of flesh and form keeps on rolling, wrapped in a new rag.
Andres Serrano’s Morgue series / Francis Bacon’s collapsing bodies / Mapplethorpe’s Man in Polyester Suit
There’s an erotic charge to that transaction, too. The collector becomes a voyeur, the photograph an accessory and everyone wears a straight face. The obscenity isn’t the body, for them, it’s also the market that wraps desire in acid-free tissue paper. Boo! knows this, with a perky smile. It reveals how art forgives itself anything, as long as we can extract meaning from it.
V. Entropy and Reconciliation
Every myth falls apart eventually. Geometry can slow degradation, but it cannot outlast it. Every perfect form eventually sags. Time doesn’t care for ratios. It eats symmetry for breakfast.
That’s the silent tragedy in Boo! It is a photograph attempting to freeze what will not be frozen. For a second, it wins. Then entropy saunters in and reclaims the crown. The body breathes, the pigment ages, and the mask of perfection begins to perspire.
Maybe that’s the real grace. Perhaps the spiral was never supposed to spiral us out of the flesh at all, only toward it again. Form soothes, yes, but it doesn’t save.
Look at the shadows. They’re not punishment, they’re mercy. They let the picture exhale. The black silk becomes almost paternal, softening the truth while still reflecting it. The picture becomes an apology, for the body, for desire.
Boo! isn’t about sin. It’s about reconciliation. The sacred and the profane have always slept together in one bed; it’s just that art pulls the curtains on them both. Beauty isn’t a moral; it’s an instant. It flows through us, pauses for a breath and moves on to dust. Perfection never lasts. It is simply something to hold while this happens. Boo! ends where the myth of order always does. Something we try to measure and our endless effort to tidy up what will not stays still.
