Islamic art is distinguished from other types of sacred art by a very precise characteristic: it does not include the representation of God, as an abstract entity. While entering any church we can admire frescoes and images of God on many occasions, in a mosque we will never find its figurative representation.
This should not make you think of mosques as bare and aseptic places, on the contrary. In Islamic culture, too, the celebration of God passes through art, it simply does so with different but no less exceptional means and techniques.
At the heart of Islamic art, we find three fundamental elements: geometric motifs, arabesque and calligraphy. Plant elements are interwoven into basic geometric shapes such as the circle, the square, the triangle which, thanks to both careful superimposition and the use of colour, transform the appearance of domes, floors, porticos, but also of objects such as carpets, tiles and ceramics.
As Islamic artists have done and continue to do, Julia Ibbini and Stephane Noyer use the same techniques to create their wonderful paper sculptures.
Julia Ibbini is a visual artist and designer with a background in graphic design and collage, Stephane Noyer is a computer scientist with a passion for computational geometry. They started Ibbini Studio in 2017 and have been combining their skills and expertise ever since to create paper works that are inspired exactly by those arabesques found in Islamic art.
Through a creative process that involves both the use of software and algorithms created by Stephane Noyer to laser-cut the sheets of paper and Julia Ibbini’s painstaking manual work of assembling the work using glue, pins and scalpels, the final sculptures are both mesmerizing and deceptive.
We get lost in the intricate decorative motifs and can hardly believe that they are made entirely of paper.
On Ibbini Studio’s Instagram profile you can see all their creations and on the website you can also buy or commission works!
– Read also: Ayumi Shibata and her paper cities


