Composition with Gray Lines presents a flat surface and not a picture. Whilst Mondrian used no machine to create this piece, the rigid and pristine regularity of the grid is perceived as being mechanical.
from simple and flawless.[1] It is possible to develop new modes of non-representational creation and interactivity through exploring their algorithmic paradox.
Mondrian’s progress signifies the shift from the grid that is used as a ‘neutral’ starting point e.g. a graph-paper on which the pictorial illusion of the Renaissance perspective is created, to the dominance of the grid as a flat and thus, fully controllable and selfsufficient domain. Following Krauss’s description of Mondrian’s progress, the “… regularity of the arithmetic order” is now restored through the “reinvention of the ground as figure…”.
Although not directly linked to digital technology, Rosalind Krauss‘s description of Piet Mondrian‘s progress one of the most representative examples of the modernist transition in painting contributes to elucidating the role of the mathematical grid in abstracting perception; a kind of ‘predecessor’ to the operational matrix of digital systems.
As Krauss describes: “The scatter and gaps of the natural field would finally be closed by the seamless regularity of the arithmetic order. Now for the first time he [Mondrian] would encounter vision as fully abstract. And the grid would succeed in drawing successiveness off this space like water evaporated from a dry lake. Leaving behind only the marks of the
Piet Mondrian’s progression from Pier and Ocean (Composition No. 10) to Composition with Gray Lines is
infrastructure of the field, scoring and crossing its surface like so many restatements of its geometrical givens.” [2]
particularly characteristic of such a transition. In the first painting, the ‘plus’ and ‘minus’ elements are abstract and signify the dynamic interlocation of physical elements.
The grid is representative of the twentieth-century rationality that is characterised by the over-optimism and reliance on information
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