![]() ![]() ![]() The grid is used to decentralize the picture surface: to create an integral surface of closely similar elements so repeating themselves as to produce a uniform textural block. Moreover, many current grid paintings are quasi-Impressionist. For example, Sol LeWitt’s gridded wall drawings are really a kind of updated Pointillism-they create a regularized vibrancy of sensation due to their small “crosshatched” scale. And yet, the grid, as currently used, owes as much to Impressionist sources as to Cubist ones. Impressionism, however, narrowing or, at times, suppressing values, turned painting into an affair of surfaces to which linear figuration as such was subsumed. When Cubism exaggerated contrasts of light and dark it maximized the skeletal aspects of traditional painting and made drawing a central issue for those who followed its lead. Of course, much 20th-century art demands attention in more or less Florentine terms, and does so because of the enormous significance of Cubism. ![]() To assume that a linear surface organization when visible in a work of art is its structure is to follow in part the Florentine precept that aspects other than drawing are somehow accessory to the work’s substance. Grids can constitute structures or can, more often, be simply frameworks. One is tempted to talk here of grid structures but if the word “structures” is to have any precise definition we must distinguish it from things that are more properly frameworks. GRIDS, WITH MODULES AND SERIES, have become important modes of organization for recent art. ![]()
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