Proekt Unovisa
2013 - 2014
Proekt Unovisa is a dedication to Malevich and Suprematism (art that would lead to the "supremacy of pure feeling or perception in the pictorial arts"). Additionally, these works were influenced by both Eastern and Western literary poets such as: Li Bai, Bai Juyi, Wang Wei and Ezra Pound who wrote without the superfluity of words; and their poetry encouraged my creative instinct to flout compositional rules - within the context of visual language - and draw on the formation between the delicate links of shape and colour.
This group of paintings is the result of a search for art's barest essentials. And like Suprematists' interest in abstraction, fired by an exploration for the 'zero degree' of painting (the point beyond which the medium could not go without ceasing to be art) - this series of abstract, geometric paintings probe the visual language of suprematism with spatial elements, utilising shifting axes and multiple perspectives.
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As a side note: the series title Proekt Unovisa is the description El Lissitzky gave his own brand of Suprematism as Prounism, a derivation of 'proekt Unovisa' (project for Unovis / "design for the confirmation of the new"); Unovis being the group that Malevich formed in Vitebsk in 1919, and which drew Lissitzky into the fold of the Suprematists.