Kazimir Malevitsj - the man of the legendary 'Black square on a white
background' - is regarded as one of the figureheads of the so-called 'abstract' art, an art that refuses to represent
the real world.
Did he not write in The Non-Objective World (1927): ‘In the year 1913, trying
desperately to free art from the dead weight of the real world, I took
refuge in the form of the square.’ ?
It pays to have a closer look on one of his works - Dynamic Suprematism -
and to describe it without prejudice.
It is obvious, then, that the geometric forms on this canvas are
deployed in some kind of space.
To be sure, it is not our familiar three-dimensional space, in which
shapes can develop and move undisturbed. Malevich' space consists of
two parallel layers - one in which the big triangle unfolds, and another
in which the smaller shapes concentrate. In its turn, the latter layer
consists of many parallel layers, in which the smaller shapes move on
different levels. The shapes that inhabit these layers, are perfectly
adapted to their layered habitat: it is two-dimensional planes. That it
is geometric shapes at that - triangles, rectangles and segments of a
circle- and hence the complete opposite of the living, that unfolds
itself in three-dimensional organic shapes, all too easily has us
overlook that their organisation is not geometric at all, but
incontestably biomorphic. The big triangle on the background is
something of a sustaining - harbouring, almost motherly - entity, around
the extremities of which more agile, heterogeneous - non-uniform -
beings are interacting in hierarchically organised configurations. The
shift of our attention from the geometry of the shapes to the organicity
of the interaction, makes visible that, although the entities may be
geometric, they are not at all lifeless. We are dealing with animated
beings, and that they are organised in complex configurations, makes its
visible in its turn that they are not subject to the forces of gravity.
For, just like the angels (of olden times), they weightlessly float in a
space that is unearthly in still another aspect: the light does not
radiaate from some central source of light that illuminates surfaces and thus
casts shadows, not even from the objects themselves, but it
pervades evenly and without any shadow the entire space - just like in
the heavens of yore that used to bathe in a divine ubiquitous (omnipresent)
light.
Although there are considerable differences with the world as we know it,
Malevich' is a world that is three-dimensional, but
layered, in which two-dimensional beings are engaged in complex
interactions, and that become visible in the light of an ether that is
spread evenly over the entire space.
No 'abstract' art, hence, but an art that reveals worlds which we
hitherto had not seen - 'figurative art'. Worse still: figurative art
that depicts its 'figures' literally - true to nature, obsequiously. The
geometric beings are not suggested through strokes or lines with an
organisation of their own, but rendered in detail and fully saturated,
and the shapes are not simplified or expressively deformed. How 'photographical'
the rendering of this unfamiliar world is, would appear in all its glory,
when we would make a three-dimensional and properly lit model of it,
and when we would make a photograph of it, to subsequently compare the
photo and the picture: the differences would be nearly perceptible.
Abstract art, the ultimate negation of the scorned 'servile
photography, figurative art hence, that shows as usual an - albeit
self-conceived - world, and that renders that world in the most
obvious and familiar - true to nature - way.
© Stefan Beyst, July 2015.