Since the year 1960 my general policy as an artist has been to attempt to install a principle of necessity, to replace the subjective, contingent and random factors more normally associated with artistic production. In some paintings of 1960-1962, in order to examine phenomena of gradual change in a systematic way, I adopted a method of considering a planar space composed of a lattice of cells, each of which was determined in relation to the others by a proportional stratification (linear division) into black and white areas. In these works I noticed that the boundary lines which determine the stratification of cells constitute two distinct sets, each in interdependent relationship to one of the two diagonals of the orthogonal lattice.
A Euclidean plane acts as the dialectical synthesis of an imagined retinal screen and the surface of a painting. In the first instance the plane is conceived as unbounded. Points in it are indistinguishable. Distance and orientation have no meaning. There is no possibility of change or movement until this plane is conceived as being constituted for some kind of modular array. We have no justification for assuming the primitive condition of the plane to have been either positive or negative. It is the act of drawing the distinction which itself defines positive/negative relationships and which imparts, reflexively, the properties of both positivity and negativity to the original plane.
61 squa
