Page 268 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Byzantine Painting through Contemporary Eyes
indirect relationship with the Byzantine system of illumination where figures radiate with an unnatural light located within them. In Byzantine painting, this concept of the inner light “breaking out” from the human form, is practically accomplished through the gradual application of layers of colour, where white is gradually added to each of the succeeding layers – the last one being applied as almost entirely white calligraphic ac- centuations of emphasised features.
The example of Malevich’s work which manifests this connection most clearly is the painting antedated to 1908 entitled Women Bathers (c.1930) shown in image 22, where three female figures are depicted as purely white and with almost no anatomical detail within their outer contours. These three figures are depicted against a much more real- istic landscape in the background; through this, Malevich wanted to symbolically em- phasise how they embody something which is not perceivable in external nature. In ef- fect, these three figures are but one light embodied in separate representations of human form. They even strikingly remind of the hesychast teaching of the uncreated light, dis- cussed in the second chapter of this book. Thus, it could be argued that Malevich was a kind of a Neo-Byzantine painter who eventually abandoned the anthropomorphic form in search of more unmediated pictorial significations. In 1919 he stated: “I have defeated the blue lining of the sky, I tore it apart, I placed the colour inside of the pocket which was thereby created and I made a knot. Fly! In front of us unfolds the white and free abyss.”38
Malevich’s instruction to “fly” into the white space of his Suprematist works, implies that through their visuality, his works of art take part in nature itself, and thus, inevita- bly, although they possess a nature of their own, they remain in an undisputable rela- tionship with nature manifest. The following two excerpts from Malevich’s poetry (1913) define best how he saw both himself and his practice in regards to God and Nature.
“I search for God, search for my face
I have already drawn its contour and I’m trying to enter into it And my logic is the pathway towards it
Which is drawn by the intuition
The smile illuminates my face and that smile means wisdom” (...)
38 Our translation of: «Νίκησα τη μπλε φόδρα του ουρανού, την ξέσκισα, τοποθέτησα το χρώμα στο εσωτερικό της τσέπης που δημιουργήθηκε με αυτόν τον τρόπο κι έκανα έναν κόμπο. Πετάξτε! Μπροστά μας απλώνεται η λευκή κι ελεύθερη άβυσσος.» This is a citation from Malevich’s text entitled Suprematism I. See: Καζιμίρ Μάλεβιτς, Γραπτά, μετάφραση: Δημήτρης Χορόσκελης (Θεσσαλονίκη: Εκδόσεις Βάνιας, 1992), 102.
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