135b, The Desperate Hand, from X-rayish Photographs (2025)
The grids in Henry Lewis’ compositions may simply provide a skeleton on which to hang the images. However, they also reference crossword puzzles suggesting a possible meaning and may even initiate the possibility of a narrative. Grids in modern art have come to suggest non-representational spaces devoid of affect. Grids are not the result of imitation, but of aesthetic decree. Grids borrow a flat mathematical or scientific mode and yet behind every grid lurks a symbolist story. Mondrian saw religious connotations in the grid. Agnes Martin spoke of her grids as providing a quiet space for contemplation or meditation. Grids have an affinity with the idea of the horizon and the boundary between material and immaterial domains implying transcendence. A grid is a traditional and effective abstract device but it is also a powerful symbol of something quite explicit. One form of passage that these works specifically invoke is between the conscious domain and the unconscious mind. The grid may also be interpreted as a form of self-portraiture. In Lewis’ grids, there is a shadowy human presence to be made out, the entrapped presence of the artist herself.
Breathing is something all animals have to do to stay alive it is the oxygen we need and in turn the oxygen only exists because plants have preceded us ingesting carbon dioxide, absorbing the carbon to build their bodies and exhaling the oxygen that makes all animal life on earth possible. The biosphere is scarily thin and oxygen is heavy enough to stay there rather than flying off into space. Lewis has noted that the minute particles of matter from water vapour to other bodily traces that constitute the cloud of breath are captured as Photons, a substitution that is part of the indexical nature of photography and particularly at the amazing speeds when the image is caught using flash that exists for a bare 1/20,000 of a second. (adapted from Anthony Bond “Of Grids and Indexes” (2024).
