LOOSING THE GRID
2025 ongoing
These paintings begin with structure, then work against it. The grid is never fully abandoned — it haunts the composition as negative pressure. This is a body of work about what we build, why we cling to it, and what becomes possible only after we let it go.
Losing the Grid
There is something I have always been trying to square: order and flow. The attempt is impossible, and I have been making it my whole life.
You see it in a garden — how you plan it, structure it, divide it into beds and borders, and then something grows sideways, roots push through, the season does what it does. The structure was real. The deviation is also real. The garden is both, always, at the same time.
You see it in cultures. I have lived between them — different languages, different logics, different ways of organising a day or a room or a life. Each one has its own grid, its own underlying order that people inside it barely notice because it is simply the shape of things. Moving between cultures means feeling those grids — their edges, their incompatibilities, the places where one system of order has no equivalent in another. You learn to live in the gap. You learn that the gap is not empty.
I did not know, while I was painting these works, that this is what I was doing. I knew the formal problem — the grid under pressure, the structure absorbing disturbance until it could no longer hold — but the feeling underneath it, the lifelong attempt to square something that cannot be squared, I could only see that later. The paintings knew before I did.
These works begin with a proposition: that every mark carries the memory of the system it refuses. The grid is never fully abandoned. It haunts the composition as negative pressure — felt in the resistance of each gesture, in the way a diagonal cut refuses alignment, in the way colour that should stay within a zone bleeds past its edge. The structure is not the enemy. It is the condition of everything that follows.
The series moves through erosion: from paintings where the architectural framework holds, through works where it strains and buckles, toward canvases where only the ghost of structure remains — felt but no longer visible. It is a body of work about what we build, why we cling to it, and what becomes possible only when we finally let it go.
Not because order is wrong. But because flow was always also true.
