Page 265 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes
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Chapter V
depicting perceived reality in a new, fuller way, Cubism was the threshold over which Malevich stepped into abstraction, as through that very tendency to depict reality in a fuller way, Cubism pertained to a dynamic kind of simplification and therein by conse- quence also pertained to abstraction. Of course, this is not to imply that all simplification necessarily leads to the loss of figural form and to completely abstract results.
That said, it was Malevich’s unique experience of human reality that led him towards abstraction. In 1920 he indirectly described the genesis of his abstraction by saying: “Thus, to whichever thing we ascribe the name ‘reality’ it will be an infinite which has neither weight, nor measure, neither time, nor space, neither absoluteness, nor relativity, which never got locked into form.”29 In addition, the advent of the powered flight and the “mythology of flight” in early 20th century Russian art have had a significant effect on the formation of Malevich’s Suprematism.30
In Suprematism, the quadrilateral and geometrical shapes are rough-hewn and this denotes a humanistic kind of spontaneity. By virtue of their immediacy, Malevich’s paintings of the Suprematist phase prefigure a new kind of human selfhood. Unlike in Cubism, most of Malevich’s Suprematist works cannot be logically reconstructed to a form which can be found in nature, they can only be decoded to purely pictorial mean- ings. A square in the Suprematist phase of Malevich’s painting is the actual object, how- ever, it is an object with layers of concealed meanings. In this sense Malevich’s work partly relates to the Mystical Theology of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite. More par- ticularly, in Dionysius’ writings, as emphasised by Moshe Barasch, “the symbolon, while never negating the difference between symbol and symbolised, represents mainly what they have in common. Symbolon, in his view, is not only a sign, but is actually the thing itself.”31
We could draw a more exploratory comparison between Malevich’s artistic practice and the aesthetics of Late Byzantine painting, and take into consideration the tendency towards abstraction noted in the X structure of the two fresco compositions at Protaton, that of the Resurrection and that of Baptism, which were analysed earlier in this work. Our observation is that a significant number of Malevich’s Suprematist works can be related to the basic X structure in the compositions of the two frescoes at Protaton (im-
29 Our translation of: «Έτσι, σε οποιοδήποτε πράγμα κι αν δώσουμε το όνομα «πραγματικότητα» θα είναι το άπειρο πού δεν έχει ούτε βάρος, ούτε μέτρο, ούτε χρόνο, ούτε χώρο, ούτε απολυτότητα, ούτε σχετικότητα, που δεν κλείστηκε ποτέ σε μορφή.» This is a citation from Malevich’s text entitled God is not Cast Down: Art, Church, Factory. See: Καζιμίρ Μάλεβιτς, Γραπτά, μετάφραση: Δημήτρης Χορόσκελης (Θεσσαλονίκη: Εκδόσεις Βάνιας, 1992), 180.
30 Gilles Néret, Kazimir Malevich 1878–1935 and Suprematism (Taschen, 2003), 65.
31 Moshe Barasch, Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 167.
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