After passing through Impressionism and the figurative arts, Kazimir Malevich set out in search of a new representation of pictorial art, far removed from any historical reference. Influenced by the geometric fragmentation of Cubism and the dynamics of the image proposed by Futurism, Malevich sought to eliminate any notion of volume in his painting. His aim was to erase objects from the canvas. To liberate painting from any objective representation, from any socio-historical reference. Malevich waged a tenacious spiritual battle to achieve the supremacy of plastic sensibility in his painting.

While developing his new artistic concept, Malevich was commissioned to design the costumes for the Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, a story about a group of peasants who set out to conquer the sun. Malevich composed an unprecedented formal repertoire for a theatrical work. He designed geometric costumes made of cardboard, painted in bright colours, similar to his cubo-futurist paintings. These costumes restricted the mobility of the performers, whose heads were covered with masks. The scenery lacked spatiality and the backdrop was a flat, patterned curtain with a black square painted in the centre. For Malevich, it was an opportunity to rehearse a new process of reflection, 'a pictorial space of abstract logic'. The opera premiered in St Petersburg in 1913, the same year that Malevich composed an extreme work that omitted any cultural reference, the "black square on a white background" .

Kazimir Malevich, Supremacía de la sensibilidad

This work marks a definitive break with academic art by denying any naturalistic or figurative reference. Malevich performs an act of pure creation, without any historical or social reference. The Black Square is the result of a pictorial quest that Malevich had been experimenting with for twenty years. The communion between man and the universe as an argument for thinking a non-objective art. The vision of a future in which a more egalitarian society would allow man to live in harmony with the universe.

Malevich achieves his goal. He constructed an art of the imagination that expressed the supremacy of pure sensibility in the figurative arts. A new art rooted in a spiritual quest to subdue the viewer in a perceptive reality where the only reference is the object and the sensations it evokes. The formal reference of these works is the square. From this figure, the rectangle and the circumference evolve. Weightless elements with a monochrome matrix, the painting encourages movement, because mobility is the basis of modern life. A new relationship with space, where the pictorial experience is expressed through codes derived from the artist's own sensibility.

In December 1915, the last Futurist exhibition, entitled '0.10', was held at the Nadiejda Dobichina Gallery in St Petersburg. Malevich exhibited 39 works, arranged on the walls of the room in a sequence that traced relationships between the paintings on display. The 'black square' is displayed in the top corner of one of the corners, tilted towards the viewer. In this action, Malevich breaks perspective with the flatness of the figure, creating a state of weightlessness in the rest of the works, which seem to 'float' in space.

This exhibition is the first time that Malevich's non-objective work has been presented to the general public. In it, he explains the concepts of dynamism and energy that guide his painting, in line with the new scientific theories of Einstein and other scientists.

Malevich continued his research by experimenting with colour in the figures.

He experimented with Red Suprematism, reduced to eight rectangles of this colour, in which the figures, arranged diagonally and in different sizes, favour the sensation of weightlessness, and also with Dynamic Suprematism, in which he incorporated more complex figures and an expanded palette of blue, yellow, green, white and black.

In 1917, with the triumph of the Revolution, Malevich was appointed chairman of the National Art Commission and promoted the development of the applied arts in a very complex civil context. In 1919, Lissitzky persuaded Malevich to join Marc Chagall's Vitebsk School of Art, and Malevich left Moscow for Vitebsk, where he began teaching at the school. Together with other teachers and students at the school, Malevich founded UNOVIS, whose aim was to merge art with the needs of contemporary life.

In 1920, after Chagall's departure, Malevich was appointed director of the art school.Malevich understood the need to bring about changes in teaching, including a new architecture, uncontaminated by politics and everyday life, as was the case with Constructivism. However, due to a series of financial and administrative problems that arose at the Vitebsk Art School, Malevich moved his UNOVIS project to the Petrograd State Institute of Artistic Culture (GINKhUK).Influenced by Lissitzky, Malevich began to experiment with three-dimensional figures.His early works, called "planites", depict weightless figures in which a series of volumes of different shapes are agglomerated along a horizontal axis.

Malevich sought to place the viewer in an aerial space that transcended the visual environment and placed him in a spiritual terrain, imagining these compositions as dwellings of the future.He also extended his system to architecture, constructing a series of models with prismatic volumes of different sizes, which he called "Architectons".Malevich professed his energy in form as an expression of the artist's supreme emotional sensitivity. He conceived of art as a philosophical medium in which time, colour and space are interrelated; he explored unknown possibilities in painting to the point of breaking the laws of composition in pictorial space; he created his own universe and transformed it into an instrument that changed the rules of art by creating a spiritual pact between the viewer and the painting.

Marcelo Gardinetti