2021 - new harvest: Presentation of the Cube - the main object in sculpture
Ready to start our 102 harvest! everyone is what creates day by day. New vintage, new challenge. harvest represents the continuity, the circle of life. We are ready to start and write a new chapter.
Chiara Soldati
WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP OF YELLOW COLOR, or "Yellow Road" is turning on lights -
this is how Yellow Road began in the spring of 2018 on the website of the Obzor newspaper. And "Yellow Road" was opened by Chiara Soldati, owner of the La Scolca estate. Today the "Yellow Road" has more than 160 thousand readers.
A little more than 100 years have passed since the appearance of Malevich's Black Square. And today (in the fall of 2021) I also have a harvest:
Presentation of the Cube - the main object in sculpture (first forms).
That is why I put Chiara's statement in place of an epigraph.
(As illustrations to the text, I will put here some of my works)
To start with, just 2 words about Suprematism…
Why is it important now to remember about Suprematism? Because reflecting on the main sculpture form, I certainly use Black Square of Malevich as the starting point.
Of course, Suprematism per se is just a particular case of Abstract Art. The merit of Malevich consists of putting a lot of efforts to give a precise characteristic of Suprematism. He described principles on which a suprematic painting is based. But Malevich wasn’t alone in this field. Back in 1910 (5 years before Suprematism emerged) Kandinsky wrote in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art: “
The outer task may assume many different shapes; but it will never fail in one of two purposes:
(1) Either form aims at so limiting surfaces as to fashion of them some material object;
(2) Or form remains abstract, describing only a non-material, spiritual entity. Such non-material entities, with life and value as such, are a circle, a triangle, a rhombus, a trapeze, etc., many of them so complicated as to have no mathematical denomination.
All these forms are equal citizens in the realm of the abstract.”.
Olga Rozanova believed that Malevich borrowed her idea of Suprematism. Today anyone can find online her reasoning in this argument.
It seems to me that today, a hundred years after those significant events, ‘geometric’ ideas are not only in the air but hang like a thick curtain over us. But application of geometrical forms and bodies (and compelling analysis thereof in the contemporary art) seemed too insignificant to me. Hence there appeared my own geometrical realism and Suprematic Realism.
In Suprematic Realism I started working with purely geometrical bodies. If we consider emergence of simplest geometrical forms on canvas, we will see that the triangle is the most passive, most inert form.
Passivity of the square (rectangle) prompted Kazimir Malevich to choose it as the main figure. Compressing the square from all the sides we can squeeze it until it becomes a point. But measures of the point are so tiny that research of its form is practically impossible. But changing limits (by unevenly compressing or lengthening) of the square we can end up with an oval (circle), triangle etc. These geometrical forms are characteristic of higher activity. The circle is associated with movement (a wheel) or with a natural object (the sun). Triangle is also associated with motion, it points the direction of movement or reveals form (a pyramid, mountain)
In Geometrical Realism passivity of the form, e.g. of rectangle, allowed me to use it in any art quality. The square is an object-chameleon, it depends on text, on the name, as the most abstract geometrical element which absorbs any name.
Overall Geometrical Realism I would like to call all paintings where one of the elements is a geometrical figure, i.e. all forms of Cubism, Suprematism, Avantgarde and my own Geometrical landscape and Still Life.
But while the term is still loosely defined, I will call geometrical realism only my own artworks. In Geometrical Realism the same elements are used as in Suprematism, but they are differently ‘colored’. Their application is more concrete. Here even names ‘landscape’ and ‘still life’ are appropriate (i.e. traditional use of the terms)
My use of cubes and parallelepipeds in first sculpture compositions (of Suprematic Realism) and multicolored triangles in collages is actually a result of speculations about triangle as the most passive and therefore the most appropriate element for work, which easily becomes what you want it to be.
Then it is clear that zero point in sculpture is the cube.
In 2010 I already exhibited a cube. With a cube and a ball to be more precise. This composition was used to present famous sculptor Jacques Lipchitz and his wife Berta.
In 2014 it was created and in 2015 in the exhibition “If Malevich were alive, he would be 137” the cube was not merely a cube, but an independent art object, without any filling. Its cardboard version is kept in my workshop to this day. No one fancied or estimated anything but exactly 100 years after the Black Square of Malevich there came 2-colored cube, the first sculpture object which claims to be the zero point in sculpture.
If we agree with Malevich that the Black Square is a unique art object, a zero point and takes a special place in painting, then why cannot be a similar object in sculpture?
However strange it may seem, but it took me about 30 years to come to this conclusion.
In my very first personal exhibition in Vilnius (in Russian Cultural Center) there was a painting “Red square rabbit, blue square orange and small green square me, behind the rabbit”
During years spent in arts I noticed that often remarkable ideas visit an artist not when he puts a suitcase and glasses and gives a speech, but when he is inventing things that no one needs. Perhaps abstract things. May be even absurd. The main thing is that it should be funny, and doesn’t smell like naphthalene.
And now after seven years, already in 2021 I made up my mind to create a 1st letter of sculpture alphabet. In real size.
In my mind I imagined the cube with edge of 92.4 cm. But later when I had material in my hands and could visualize the cube more realistically, I ended up with these dimensions: 60.5 x 60.5 x 60.5 cm As for material, it’s made of wood, plywood, cardboard and acrylic. And also I made 10 author copies with dimensions: 13.2 x 13.2 x 13.2 cm.
Now we have the cube, 2-colored cube. The red helps the black square to leave 2-D plane and enter the world of sculpture. If we are to review the evolution of sculpture chronologically, we would come to the cube as the last artificial form and its red color is inward-oriented and will disappear when the sculpture is placed on a plane and cease its being as a volume body. And if we consider the cube as the very first abstract (geometrical) form of art, then development of this form will certainly lead us to an infinite number of new forms. The use of color (color scheme) in new objects hasn’t been studied by me, or better said, hasn’t been defined.
Sergey Evtuhov, author of the project
