The multiple grid of montage: Perspectives for the critical image in the contemporaneity

Abstract

The article investigates a possible genealogy of the use of the grid system of images made by artists since the 1990s. Developed by classical visual thought, the representation grid of the visible undergoes transformations until post-Cubist artists develop an abstract modular framework, which Mondrian will, from a certain moment of his trajectory, resign in favor of the diagram. This linear history, however, is even more complex. Among the artists of the historical groups of avantguards - from constructivism to surrealism -, different modalities of multiple frames emerge out of montages of photographic images. In the 1960s and 1970s, the multiple picture resurfaces in Pop Art, being transformed by Conceptual Art and the new generation of the 1990’s. I insist on the term grid with the intentions of not accepting ideas of definitive historical ruptures, but also refusing ideas of evolution.