Measuring beauty

For Becker, measuring beauty presupposes classical training. Vitruv, Leonardo, L. B. Alberti – time and again it’s the great classical aesthetes of the Renaissance he cites as his sources. Far from being slavish, he deals with them so sure-footedly that the mystery of the double square (to name just one of the many ordering and proportioning systems he works with) and his derivations with a compass, the ordered shifts in proportion, seem like his artistic theory of everything. The squaring of jewelry creation, in his case, has something perfectionistic and analytic in terms of approach, something playfully light in its results. It’s all about miniatures in this aesthetic tinker’s laboratory ‒ as if the fate of the world depended on it. And perhaps the fate of the world really does depend on it, a world in which proportions are harmoniously coordinated, when position and inclination of a tiny bent titanium plate are being decided in his workshop on Artilleriestrasse in Munich. The geometry of beauty knows no compromises, only laws of regularity. With their bends and turns, some of his jewelry pieces resemble chromatic scales as soon as they are worn, continually modeling and paraphrasing the tones. Who would have thought that necklaces not only glitter with the slightest movement, but even produce sounds? Music of the spheres ‒ thank heavens it’s all just a very earnest game. The genre of applied art can vouch for this, with its constant striving to keep the human element in mind. There is no such thing, after all, as necklaces, bracelets or rings beyond their wearers, owners and users ‒ the human beings they are made for. And so it is this double movement, the movement of movement, that really brings Becker’s artefacts to life.