Alex Manea 

TEXT:

 

     In this series, I engage with the grid, the most rational and controlling structure in modern art, and transform it into a system for recording, measuring, and preserving memory. Each work begins with an image drawn from my surroundings or personal life, postcards, exhibition cards, fragments of packaging, commercial prints, or photographs. Over these surfaces, I impose a precise one-centimeter grid, counting and numbering each square, converting the image into a record of both labor and temporality. The act of enumeration renders the visual familiar and intimate simultaneously, turning the image into a quantifiable object that operates as both archive and artwork.

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     What interests me most is the tension between structure and meaning. By fragmenting images into uniform units, I strip them of their conventional narrative and emotional hierarchy, exposing the mechanics behind perception, memory, and visual experience. The grid functions not as a container, but as a lens through which the image is dissected, analyzed, and reconstituted, revealing the arbitrariness and obsession underlying our desire to measure and categorize. Numbering the squares suggests the rationality of scientific cataloguing, yet the accumulation of labor and repetition produces a subtle absurdity, highlighting the impossibility of fully containing either the visual or the experiential within a rigid system.

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     The series also considers value in concrete terms. By assigning price according to each square centimeter, I make the commodification of art overt, binding market logic to material presence and personal effort. The act of counting becomes both a measure of time and a performative assertion of artistic authority. Value is no longer abstract or symbolic; it is inseparable from labor, attention, and the obsessive rhythm of repetitive engagement.

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     At its core, Grids is an exploration of limits. The tension between precision and excess, between the methodical and the arbitrary, persists throughout each work. The grid simultaneously constrains and exposes the underlying image, demonstrating that rational systems cannot fully encompass human experience, emotion, or memory. Measurement, in this context, is an instrument of inquiry rather than mastery, revealing both the potential and the inadequacy of order as a framework for understanding the world.

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     In the end, the series leaves its own methodology visible, presenting labor and obsession as subjects in their own right. The works do not offer resolution or synthesis; they insist that meaning emerges not from containment, but from the meticulous act of breaking the familiar into parts and observing the result, however precise or absurd it may appear.