Page 264 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
image 14 shows a detail of the fresco of the Second Coming in the chapel of the church of Chora in Constantinople: The angel of the eschaton is depicted to be simultaneously both unfolding and rolling up the scroll of time. We deem that Byzantine artists who painted the angel with a scroll made a deliberate effort to convey the simultaneous un- folding and rolling up of the scroll of time, precisely in order to depict the theological reality that the eschaton is not “located” at the end of history, but rather, that it is to be found before and after history, therein encompassing the overall human experience with- in time and eternity. By virtue of his heightened intuition and his outstanding creativity, Malevich seems to show us how we can appreciate the eschatological aspects of his Su- prematist paintings through the prism of the Late Byzantine experience, exemplified in the angel of the eschaton.
In conclusion of this third case-study, we argue that aspects such as the mysterious black surface to which the right hand in Malevich’s Self Portrait (painted in 1933) is indi- cating and the earlier noted theological kind of connection to the Byzantine iconograph- ic theme of Hodigitria, point to a significant and hitherto unexplored depth of the influ- ences of Late Byzantine painting in Malevich’s work.
Case Study 4: Malevich’s Suprematism and its indicative theological aspects
It is very important that Malevich relates his Suprematist expression mainly to an ex- perience of a metaphysical space and “free flight.” The Suprematist movement was launched by Malevich in December 1915, when at 0.10–The Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting held in the Nadezdha Dobychina gallery in Saint Petersburg, he exhibited forty six works which were all completely abstract.26 The paintings of this exhibition were accompanied by a booklet entitled From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting. By that stage, as he states in the text of this booklet, Malevich had transformed himself “into the zero of form.”27
We should acknowledge here that historically Cubism opened avenues which neces- sarily led further away from the depiction of realistic and naturalistic form. Thus, for example, contrary to Golding’s view28 it is not ironic at all, that being concerned with
26 Ibid., 49.
27 Our translation of: «μεταμορφώθηκα σε μηδέν των μορφών.» Καζιμίρ Μάλεβιτς, Γραπτά, μετάφραση: Δημήτρης Χορόσκελης (Θεσσαλονίκη: Εκδόσεις Βάνιας, 1992), 87.
28 John Golding, Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko and Still (Thames & Hudson, 2000), 57.
262