Page 377 - Uros Todorovic Byzantine Painting Contemporary Eyes

Apendix
significance of this is in the fact that Byzantine icons, as well as frescoes, are always rendered in several separate and distinct layers and their making requires highly trained hands and a high level of discipline. Given that a Byzantine icon is quite deliberately rendered in separate and distinct layers, its aesthetic and theological depth is its partial- ly visible first layer – a phenomenon eloquently acknowledged by Ziogas in his book entitled The Byzantine Malevich. From a studio-based perspective, a Byzantine iconogra- pher gives prime importance to the first layer of the image (called “proplasmos”), which actually later becomes predominately covered, and therefore, the subsequent layers can be experienced as discernible layers of meaning, which are to be gradually revealed in the experience of a sufficiently prepared observer. Accordingly, throughout our visual com- parisons and analyses, we elaborate on those relationships between Late Byzantine and Modern painting that can be detected not only on the surface but also in the practical experience of the relevant artists. This is perhaps most obvious in our last three chapters, related to Kandinsky, Malevich and Rothko respectively. In this regard, Spira’s approach is rather different.
To clarify further, comparatively speaking, our approach is closer to the approach of Ziogas than what it is to the approach employed in Spira’s book. For example, after ar- guing that Malevich’s dissolution of the sense of a separate self into the sense of reality as a whole comes extremely close to the intuition of the Orthodox monastic practice (teachings of Gregory Palamas),21 Spira insightfully discusses the analogous relevance of Florensky’s identification of the icon screen (in his book Iconostasis) with “the mem- brane between the visible and the invisible worlds.”22 On the other hand, although with- out referring to Florensky, being himself a practicing artist, Ziogas progresses a step further by visually and practically demonstrating how that “membrane” applies to the Byzantine iconicity of Malevich’s Black Square. In this sense, we observe that such a methodology exemplified in Ziogas’ book takes into consideration the entire complexity of the artistic experience related to the Byzantine iconographic tradition, and as such is closer to unveiling that experience. Also, Ziogas’ methodology demonstrates more prac- tically the relationship of that artistic experience to Malevich’s abstract painting. Over- all, in regards to our present book, its separate topics in each of the chapters, as well as its specific methodology, which includes not only visual comparisons and visual analy- ses but also authentic visual demonstrations, expand significantly beyond the scope and the approach of both Spira’s and Ziogas’ publications.
21 Andrew Spira, The Avant-Garde Icon: Russian Avant-Garde Art and the Icon Painting Tradition (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2008), 147.
22 Ibid.
375