On two right feet, the
bather’s big red hands
Fling his naked eye into
unknown waters.
His mission is to paint
colourless austerity.
Perhaps he’s had an excess in
Shchukin’s house.
Malevich is a priestly
prophet before the zero of form.
He says that art is not a
necktie on a starched shirt.
Or a loaded camel bearing
odalisques,
Sad sex slaves to the
Sultan’s seraglio.
Delusion no question fires
his hot act of painting.
The whiteness of the sugar
his father refined,
Like the pure white winter
fur of the stoat,
Has become a pure
abstraction, an end in itself.
So Black Squares buries colours under blackness.
He consecrates it across the
corner of the room,
As you would hang a
devotional Russian icon.
Massless monochrome dissolves
the colour spectrum.
He says White on White conquers the lining
Of the coloured sky, plucks
the colours,
Puts them into a bag he’s
made, and knots it tight.
He summons sight to the white
free depths of infinity.
Blackness, whiteness pour
into borderless squares.
These abstractions nullify
the palette of flowers,
Promise a Kantian
transcendentalism of colour
Without the embodied subject
who is mauled by the now.
But his windowless art goes beyond
the pure sensation
He invited the homeless
vagrant in to find an opening to.
Today, you can see the
sublimated colour planes
In Black Squares through the veins of craquelure.
In White on White, an off-white off-centre asymmetrical
Square seems to move in a
borderless white field.
But traces of Malevich’s hand
printed in the texture
Give the geometry the warm
solo dance of human touch.
In his late figural work
there is the sacral human face.
The soft sensitive grey eyes
of his wife are true
To real life, as she walks in
red, blue and white,
With her leather bag tucked
under her right arm.
He signed the painting of his
wife with a black square.
When Malevich realised he had
inspirited pictorial art,
The clouds in Krasnaya Square
were cream and honey.
In death’s abstraction the
bare icon Black Square hangs above him.
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