Mondrian's Desktop

“Ultimately, however, the artist no longer needs a particular point in nature in order to achieve an image of beauty. As the universal becomes more conscious in him because the individual has lost its dominating influence, from this greater consciousness he spontaneously creates equilibrated relationships – complete harmony – the goal of art. He has then assimilated outwardness into himself: thus it remains within him – to move him. Piet Mondrian, ‘Nature, Reality and Abstract Reality’, 1920.

In the early 1920’s, Dutch artist Piet Mondrian began to explore grid-like structures in his paintings. Works such as “Tableau 1’ (1921) marked a shift away from the representational form that had defined his career to this point, and precipitated a movement towards an austere minimalism of lines, rectangles, squares and primary colours. This development was one motivated by a desire to reject the individual – understood as specific, local representation - and instead, to capture a sense of the universal through an embrace of the fundamental language of line and colour. For Mondrian, this was the purpose of art – to express ‘the beauty of life’ through connection with the essence of the universal.

‘Mondrian’s Desktop’ situates these notions in the digital age of the 21st century. By transforming Mondrian’s grids into the windows of a desktop, it seeks to ask whether the desktop itself can contain beauty - whether the windows of a desktop might present us with something of the universal language of line and colour, removed from specific representation, and through such reduction, gesture to the universal; or, more figuratively, whether the window of the browser itself might today represent a window to a form of the universality Mondrian originally sought, one now found in the borderless world of the internet.

A curated output of 64 editions, made in P5js.