Camponovo
Grids Reconsidered

The smallest unit of a grid is a cross — two perpendicular lines intersecting at a point. Aurélie Nemours, in a text accompanying the etching portfolio Symmetria (Editions Fanal Basel, 1982), wrote of that point as a square. While working on the series Broken Grids, however, I noticed something intriguing: when lines interrupted by a gap intersect at their break, they create a virtual point — and that point is round.

Grids have been central to constructive art since its inception, their possibilities explored by many artists over decades. The challenge today is finding genuine originality when remaining within a strictly geometric and mathematical context. My first and most radical approach was to express the grid without painting it. This led to the White Grids series. Only black shapes are painted — the grids emerge as bright virtual optical effects, created entirely by the tension between the black forms.

Those fragmented black shapes of the White Grids series led to a broader idea: to introduce breaks into the grid itself. Broken Grids became the space to explore this. One approach was to divide the grid into vertical stripes and shift them up and down until a virtual banding effect appeared on the canvas. Subsequently, building on my experience with the White Grids and Broken Lines, I explored the possibility of generating virtual optical effects using fine lines to construct the grids. These virtual textures can be shaped through their interaction with other elements of the composition. In some paintings, juxtaposed virtual and painted forms establish a dialogue between perception and materiality.

In a recent series of diptychs, I rendered the underlying structure of the grid barely recognizable. By enlarging one cell of the grid, I shifted the focus towards the interaction between colours, thereby giving colour the predominant role again.

Deconstruction Sequences follows a grid through a progressive transformation. In one sequence, subdivisions are gradually added from one painting to the next, while in the other they are progressively removed. In the fifth and final stages, the canvases themselves become part of the process by being split into several fragments.

In Grid Modulations and Monochromatic Grids, I work with wide strip grids. By changing the colour of certain parts of the grid — what I call Grid Modulations — the selected parts become distinct shapes that interact reciprocally across the composition. In this series I also introduce the use of irregular grids drawn by chance. In the Monochromatic Grids, I explore the interaction between different hues of a single colour for grid and background.

→ Alternative assemblages of Broken Grids and Grid Modulations are presented in Beyond.