Judd, or the Grid Before the Narrative

Judd would probably say nothing. He would look at the Arbre Blanc for a long time, in silence, then point without comment at the structural grid hidden beneath the proliferation. And he would be right. His entire body of work, his entire teaching, his entire anger against the chatter of sculptors of his time was contained in that gesture: show the structure, add nothing.

I have never been to Marfa. I know that Texas desert through books, through photographs, through accounts from architect friends who returned converted. It is a gap in my education, and I know it. But I have walked through Dia:Beacon, and perhaps that was enough for me. A former Nabisco factory on the Hudson, immense halls where Judd placed his boxes in aluminum and plywood, and the northern light falling through the skylights like in a painter's studio. I stayed there a long time, alone before the aligned volumes, understanding something the books had never really told me. That these objects are not cold. That they breathe in their own way, through the light sliding across their faces, through the echo of the floor beneath one's steps, through the way the factory itself becomes part of the work. Minimalism is not an absence, it is a presence so clear that it finally leaves room for the viewer.

Everything in Judd is a refusal of narrative. No metaphor, no organicity, no tree, no symbol, no allusion. Specific objects, placed there, in the desert light or in that of a converted factory, referring to nothing but themselves. No drama, no artist's gesture, no trace of the hand. Form and material, and that is all. It is a lesson I do not forget, even when my work seems to say the opposite.

Because my work does not say the opposite, in reality. The Arbre Blanc, beneath its exuberance, is a rigorous grid: a repeated structural module, a standard balcony declined in controlled variations, a combinatory system that produces apparent chaos from perfectly regular elements. If one removes the vegetation, if one removes the inhabitants, if one strips the building of its narrative qualities, a grid remains. The apparent chaos is mathematics. The poem hides a theorem. And it is that theorem which stands, not the poem.

And there, childhood returns. Not through the main door, through a small one. I see again my grandparents' house, the patio I crossed to reach the back bedrooms, and a wall of zelliges that rose to shoulder height. Eight-pointed stars, interlocking hexagons, sixteen-pointed stars that linked together without ever showing the joint. I would sometimes stop, follow a star with my finger, try to understand where it connected to the next. I did not know I was looking at a system. I did not know that Moroccan artisans, for eight hundred years, had practiced a discipline that in the West was only named in 1965 by a New York sculptor angry at abstract expressionism. Module, repetition, symmetry, refusal of the figure, pure presence of the motif. I grew up surrounded by minimal art without knowing it, in a house that had practiced geometric rigor for eight centuries.

I know the connection is risky. Zelliges are not Judd. They carry a spiritual charge, a cosmology, a mathematical representation of divine infinity that Judd would probably have found chatty. They tell something, he wanted to silence all narration. But it is precisely this gap that interests me. Juddian minimalism is an atheistic, disenchanted minimalism that cut the motif from all transcendence to keep only its formal logic. Zelliges are an inhabited minimalism, where repetition is a prayer. Between the two, the same grid, two opposing worlds. And I work exactly in that gap: the rigor of the module without the nostalgia for the sacred, but without the aridity of the Texas desert either. A grid that knows where it comes from.

So I owe Judd what I owe the artisans who laid the zelliges in my grandparents' patio, a thousand years apart: the right to have a grid before having a narrative. The silent module that authorizes, beneath it, all possible profusion. The discipline that makes freedom practicable. Without the grid, the organism collapses. Without the theorem, the poem derails.

The depth of field lies there, exactly: between the Juddian object and the living organism, there is only one common mechanism, the repetition of a simple element that ends up producing complexity. A branch is a variable module. A leaf is an imperfect replica. The forest is a specific object that has learned to breathe, to bend in the wind, to accept its own flaws. Nature is minimalist in its own way, except that it allows itself trembling, asymmetry, error. Judd wanted clean edges, right angles, a material without history. The living wants the same rigor, but with play, blur, time. My profession is perhaps to hold that tension: Judd's grid with the tree's breath, the module of my grandparents' patio with the changing light.

A well-laid grid does not need the gaze. It holds. Perhaps that is how one recognizes just architecture: it continues, in oblivion, to carry the world that has left it., Manal Rachdi