Destructured grids
psychogeography mapping in New York City
2017
Destructured Grids is the main subject of all the abstract mixed media series developed in New York City by Philippe Halaburda during 2017.
Rooted in psychogeographic mapping, the work examines the city’s rigid urban grid as a lived, emotional structure, one shaped by movement, interruption, and internal experience.
Through fragmentation and reconfiguration, the series reflects how ordered systems fracture under pressure, memory, and human behavior.
+ Destructured grids: 2017 series overview
• Studio: Brooklyn, NY
• 51 series: canvas or paper
Developed during a period of intense urban immersion, Destructured Grids explores the breakdown of spatial order in New York City.
The city’s grid, historically a symbol of rational planning, becomes a site
of disruption, compression, and emotional negotiation. Rather than depicting the city directly, the works abstract its logic into fractured systems, interrupted pathways, and unstable geometries that reflect psychological and perceptual experience.
Concept & theme
All the artworks in the Destructured Grids series were developed using layered acrylic paint, paper collage,
and deliberate mark-making to build depth, rhythm,
and surface tension.
Repetition, erasure, and structural variation function as tools for mapping psychological pressure and spatial disorientation.
Each surface retains evidence of revision, mirroring
the city’s constant state of construction and collapse.
Materials & process
This body of work extends Halaburda’s ongoing engagement with psychogeography as a framework for understanding how environments shape emotion, cognition, and behavior.
In Destructured Grids, New York City operates as both subject and system, its rational grid dismantled into abstract fields that register internal states rather
than physical locations.
The series invites viewers to navigate tension, movement, and instability, translating urban experience into visual form.
Studio & context
The Cognitive Gridlocks series was developed in the studio as part of an ongoing investigation into emotional mapping and geographic abstraction.
The works are intended for exhibition, acquisition,
and institutional dialogue within contemporary abstract art contexts.
