“I first used the grid in my “Regression Series” of 1973 and 1974. This was before I began working with images. I used simple arithmetic calculations to produce forms on a grid. The initial drawing produced numbers along a grid’s axes, and these were used to produce the next drawing, and so forth. This arithmetic method yielded parabolic shapes that could be read as natural organisms, with metaphorical implications. But the forms were produced by a system, not my imagination. The following year, in the series “Walnut Tree Orchard,” I started using objects. I plotted the shape of the tree on a grid, then overlaid coordinates so that a single object would increase in density over the course of the series. I was using systems to critique the idea that representation is a function of intuition. I was less interested in undermining the role of representation in art, and more interested in showing that it is a construction.”
- Charles Gaines

A t once conceptually rigorous and visually compelling, Africa and Numbers is a pivotal example of Charles Gaines’s early praxis. Completed in 1984, this work concretizes the artistic epiphany he would later call “the awakening,” from which he was first inspired to use mathematical and numeric systems to create marks in ink on a grid, building upon each calculation to produce codified renderings of natural subjects. A color photograph depicting the African continent transitions through the composition in stages of visual disintegration, eventually becoming a reduced, gridded version of the original. Belying the pure logic of Gaines’s rule-based methodology, this elegant and visually poignant illustration offers an investigation into the slippages between visual and symbolic meaning.

Adopting his systematic method of production as a barrier between the work and his own subjectivity, Gaines seeks out the tensions between the empirical objective and the semiotic attachment of meaning. In reducing his images to pixelated outlines, he pushes our cognitive reception of form to its limits, probing the boundaries of what we can still perceive as a “map of Africa.” Coupled with his abiding interest in identity politics, Gaines’s formal and mathematical process becomes an investigation into how these methods construct our experiences of images, language, and each other.