In the 20th century, many artists used the grid and the mesh as foundational principles of their practice. Piet Mondrian structured pictorial space through an orthogonal network, turning the grid into a universal language. Josef Albers explored chromatic variations within rigorous geometric systems, while Op Art artists such as Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely, and Jesús Rafael Soto used grids to generate illusions, vibrations, and unstable perceptions. In minimal and conceptual art, Sol LeWitt systematized the grid as a rational, serial method of creation.

Miguel Chevalier’s video work Grilles Spatiales (2021) extends and transforms this legacy. In his work, grids—square or rectangular, openwork, in black and white or in color—become dynamic digital structures: generative and algorithmic. What was once a fixed structure in the work of his predecessors becomes flow, network, and artificial growth. Chevalier thus reinvents the modernist grid in the digital age, making it evolve and metamorphose while preserving the fundamental idea of order, pattern, and geometric logic as engines of creation.