In studying Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square and Red Square, it is profoundly tempting to slip into art historian mode with Malevich’s philosophy of color as a psychic non-objective experience and the square as the universal form of painting. Just don’t use the ‘A’-word: abstraction. Malevich hated it. These are “non-objective” paintings. Let’s bracket that for now. I’m interested in a strictly perceptual visual analysis. This painting’s elements and reduction of form are not cold nor stoic. It is not a painting of stillness. To the contrary, Black Square and Red Square is teeming with relationships governing the formal elements of the work (geometry of form, coordinates of composition, color, scale, figure/ground, texture ). I adore this painting because of its bustling visual economy, an economy in which the value is my attention. There is a constant system of exchange going on.
Before getting into those exchanges, I must acknowledge a personal passion for a rich, textured “white.” I put “white” is quotation marks here because in this (and in another favorite Malevich painting, a white-on-white composition) the white field is an optical white, a shimmering white that demonstrates its role as a common denominator of the color wheel. At the same time, this is one of many whites. It’s actually a bit of a surprise to me that the title of this painting is not called Black Square and Red Square on White.
About the visual economy: the black square’s monolithic presence is one of its compositional privileges. Another is its size. The black square is 1.8 times the size of the red square. This is what’s key: for every advantage the large black square has, the small red square compensates. Because the black square is larger, the small square is a more saturated color. The red has more of what Malevich would call “retinal intensity.” What the smaller square lacks in size, it makes up for with color. Another compositional privilege is positioning. Because of the eye movement in play, the black square appears “first” because it is on top of the red square. The red square makes its most dramatic compensation yet: it breaks the grid in its rotation. The red square’s angle speaks volumes. What I love most of all about this painting is how the little red square exposes the vulnerability of the entire grid. The little red square wins. I always root for the underdog.