The grid is perhaps one example of returning to a particular figure in painting. It has all kinds of associations both with Modernism and the monochrome, as well as earlier historical manifestations of squaring up an image for translation. Rosalind E. Krauss mentions its relation to the Romantic windowpane and implies a certain loss of narrative, a kind of ghost image. I’ve always been intrigued by the grid as an almost forlorn method, an attempt to pin something down that altogether resists measurement. There are those perverse diagrams that Ruskin uses to attempt to rationalise representations of clouds. It’s so beautifully unsuited, to use fixed geometric principles to contend with water vapour, but it speaks of the wider concern for different kinds of knowledge to be at play in a work. That my grids are pencil suggests something quite tentative, as a way of beginning something, a means of accounting for the surface of the work and attending to the different traces, marks and stains that might already be present or later appear in the process of painting. Grids then become a way of giving attention to an emergent image while also asserting a certain flatness, where mood or tone might be given as much importance as information or ideas.
Ian Kiaer
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