''The Dancing Grid'' by Doron Yashphe

Alan Watts has described human thought as a peculiar phenomenon in nature. It is the dance of lines, crisscrossing and contouring that familiar wiggly affair into separate things. Yet we don’t treat thought as a dance. We take it far too seriously. We grid nature in order to make it simpler for us to understand. In the same way that we slice up dinner, we divide the world in order to take it in more efficiently.

The mind’s mouth could encompass all of nature, if it could only chop it up just right. This is the dream of science. This is a nightmare if it becomes a habit, chewing on worn-out, ignorant theories, taking them too seriously, ignoring real experience, reenacting diminishing returns.

Watts insists that life is not the study of life. What we want, is not the cutlery. Life is outside of thought, it is in our experience, free from the procrustean grid. The grids of thought are but mosaics which tell nothing about the life that brought them about.

 

In Alejandro Stein’s art, this terribly rational grid itself is brought before us to experience in its own unusual dance. We forget this is possible, but the simple, cascaded units the grid carves out to facilitate scientific inspection are instead coloured playfully, their only purpose to dance harmoniously with their counterparts. They show that it is possible to play and dance with that most highly important acquisition of man. They swirl, vibrate, and almost pulsate. Grids of common thought and science pull us into the simple, dissected units for precise examination and registration, as we lose sight of all that is outside the intended boundaries.

Alejandro’s grids shine outwards, as the dance is performed by the grid as a whole, and beyond the canvas frame. The grid colourfully rises, like flowers from a vase. A windy field of joyful divisions that will forever stay the same. Grids necessarily stay the same. That is why we find them comforting. That is why we outgrow them. That is why they get tighter the longer we hold on.