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CritTeam. ‘The Grid’

8 — 20 November 2022

CritTeam. ‘The Grid’

'The Grid' is an artistic intervention within the Mies Van Der Rohe Pavilion. The artistic duo CritTeam explores the limits of representation and the tensions between the abstract and the figurative.

The art critic Rosalind Kraus has said that the modernity of the Barcelona Pavilion (Mies van der Rhoe / Lilly Reich, 1929) depends on its grid, and that this grid announces “modern art’s will to silence, the his hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse”. The first part of this statement is revealing, the second is misleading. It is true that the main contribution of the Barcelona Pavilion to modernity is related to the grid; but this grid is not hostile to culture and nature since it integrates them holistically, even if it does not imitate them. The Grid is a visual project that questions the particular and exemplary way in which the Barcelona Pavilion celebrates culture and nature. The methodology used consists of representing the building from several points of view strictly annexed to the task imposed by the material construction. The alignment of the view with the horizontal joints of the floor allows the shiny travertine pieces to assimilate the surrounding buildings, trees and, as a whole, the blue Mediterranean sky that is always omnipresent at the site. On the contrary, by aligning the frame with the vertical joining lines they enhance the landscape, the human presence (even when uninhabited) and nature, while the building itself usually melts between infinite and multiplied symmetries. The Grid addresses those tensions between rational and perceptive, aesthetic and intellectual, freedom and law, flow and order that are still active components of contemporary life, challenging, in a strictly artistic way, the theoretical production around this fundamental piece of modern architecture. Aesthetic experiences will not generate conclusions or prove anything, but they certainly leave indelible marks on those who are ready to experience them. The Grid challenges the separation between feeling and thought, body and mind, materiality and idealism by making visible the alternative wholeness that is intimately associated with the kind of intelligent perception that art demands and enables.