Page 258 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
trary to certain opinions, was dynamically evolving until the end of his life. Also, in the course of his artistic development Malevich explored a variety of intellectual sources. Thus, it is because of this engagement with theory that throughout the course of Ma- levich’s artistic development, Byzantine elements, and most particularly Late Byzantine elements, become radically reinvented in his painting: they become in themselves a new visual language – the language of abstraction. This abstract language of Malevich’s ex- pression requires an equally abstract approach in order for the analogies with the aes- thetics of Late Byzantine painting to be deciphered. This deciphering will be the main aim of the four case-studies that follow.
Case Study 2: A dissimilar similarity
Malevich’s work The Knife Grinder: Principle of Flickering, (image 4) is not the only example of the inconspicuously retained sense of Byzantine aesthetics. There are a num- ber of his paintings from this particular period (1912–13) where one feels that although the Byzantine element seems innate in the structure of the work, it is difficult to define how this element actually exists visually. This is where Malevich’s engagement with theory and a variety of his philosophical and theological influences begin to conceal the inner content which exists behind the visible surface of the work.
Malevich’s works created between 1912 and 1913 which are reminiscent of the Cubist and Futurist styles of painting are very much inclined towards abstraction. Notwithstand- ing the strong Futurist affinities in the period of 1912–1317 and the fact that Malevich’s works of this period, such as Woman with Pails: Dynamic Arrangement (image 7), allude to certain rudimental characteristics of the Russian traditional (naïve) painting, we ob- serve that what prevails in them is an emphasis on the abstractly implied movement, a movement which, unlike in Palaiologan painting, is not conveyed through eurhythmos but through a dynamic repetition of intersecting crystalline abstract shapes (uneven rectangles, triangles etc.) which only when viewed collectively allude to forms in nature.
Thus, as we shall shortly demonstrate visually, both in Late Byzantine and in Ma- levich’s painting of this period, there is a noteworthy expression of movement, a move- ment which is depicted through a rhythmical and mathematical repetition of distinctly static forms, in former case the figural and in latter the abstract, amounting to a compa- rable aesthetic result: the notion that the observer participates in the theme and its in-
17 Καζιμίρ Μάλεβιτς, Γραπτά, μετάφραση: Δημήτρης Χορόσκελης (Θεσσαλονίκη: Εκδόσεις Βάνιας, 1992), 14. 256