The shapes themselves vary according to characteristics of each country's educational system and the balance of scientists entering and leaving the country.
The numbers can also help create the shapes themselves -- the grids, the heights, the depths of the individual elements no longer seem like independent creative choices but somehow determined, even caused, by external forces.
One painting of a girl – sunken-chested, slack-shouldered – is even titled Older, and there is a work entitled Angela Merkel that appears to show a great mouth in mid-speech, though the shrill lemon and green seem to carry more aggressive tension than the shapes themselves.
For example, when you think that a plume of whitish or grayish haze hovering above a work's geometric shapes has been delivered via spray can, look again; the effect is achieved by infinitesimal shifts in the tones of the shapes themselves.
The subject appears to be exactly what the title claims: a map, specifically of northern regions ("The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still"), described with the flatness and stillness of the two-dimensional shapes themselves, as though the poet were becalmed by focussing on them.
The case shapes themselves are largely traditional and without flourish, with smaller diameter faces that look good on most wrist sizes.
