Mondrian was an artist who wanted his paintings to put us in touch with the infinite.
As I understand it, this is how a painting like this one is meant to work. First, Mondrian reduced his visual language to only the most basic, pure and essential forms: black and white, vertical and horizontal, one or more of the three primary colours. Only these forms, he felt, could be used in images that sought to express an infinite, eternal spiritual realm that lies beyond our understanding and our senses. So rigid was he in this belief that he had an irrevocable row with a colleague who dared to use a diagonal line and a green (in Mondrian’s eyes both were compromises, base and impure). Second, these forms had to be arranged in a series of binary oppositions that reach a kind of dynamic, unpredictable equilibrium: black/white, vertical/horizontal, colour/non-colour, thick/thin lines, enclosed/open rectangles.
What I find so satisfying and exciting about his works is that these sparse, austere, asymmetrical grids, pared down to something so reduced and basic, can be read as fragments of something much, much bigger. The grid of lines, by a simple stretch of the imagination, can be thought of as extending beyond the four edges of the frame. In this way we know where a black horizontal line is heading but not where the next intersection with a vertical will occur; we can see that a rectangle of red extends downwards beyond the bottom edge but not where it terminates. Thus, the means Mondrian employs are immediate and understandable, but their arrangement suggests that what we see is merely a tiny glimpse of an endlessly changing, infinite whole, one that lies beyond our comprehension.
It mattered to him massively, by the way, which way up these icons of modernist spirituality were hung. Each of these abstract visual metaphors for the eternal is signed with his initials – in this one just above the tiny section of red.
