“Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.”
— Jalal ad-Din Rumi
You know how it sometimes happens, you begin to think one thought in one place and unexpectedly it resolves itself somewhere completely different. This is exactly what happened to me after attending the concert of Ryoji Ikeda “Music for Strings” in Rome this November. This almost extreme form of minimalist music, based on precision and repetition, made me begin to think about what role the East played in contemporary, already Western, minimalism, and which East it actually was.
The history of abstract painting is often described as a gradual purification of form. And, as is customary in the Western self-centred tradition, the narrative usually begins with the radical reductionism of Kazimir Malevich, who practically left no trace of art for us (let us at least be grateful for the Black Square), and continues toward the mathematically calibrated grids of Agnes Martin. Throughout the twentieth century painting repeatedly attempted to free itself from the burden of representation, and it is still not entirely clear whether this was for the better.
However, such narratives risk overlooking a more fundamental philosophical question that precedes the modernist project itself, namely the problem of the relationship between the visible and that which cannot be seen.
The poetry of Rumi offers an unexpected conceptual framework through which abstraction may be understood not as a stylistic evolution within Western modernism but as ametaphysical investigation into the relationship between form and meaning, something that could hardly have been drawn exclusively from the Western tradition of the past. If one attempts to locate Rumi’s contemporaries within Western culture of the thirteenth century, one encounters a very different artistic and intellectual landscape. European art of this period remained within the framework of Christian iconography and rigid symbolic systems, where the image functioned primarily as an illustration of doctrine.
Even the most refined forms of medieval art, Gothic architecture, stained glass, manuscript illumination aimed at visually revealing the sacred through image rather than philosophically concealing it.One only has to recall the monumental stained-glass programs programs of Chartres Cathedral or Notre-Dame, where theology literally unfolds before the viewer as a sequence of images. In painting at the end of the thirteenth century in the work of Giotto (for instance the frescoes of the Arena Chapel, Padua).
Against such a background, Rumi’s poetry appears almost as an opposite strategy of thought. It does not attempt to make meaning more visible. I would say it suggests that form is merely a shell through which meaning hints at its presence.
It is important to emphasise that many ideas later perceived as achievements of Western modernism were inspired by much older Eastern and more broadly Asian traditions of thought and art. Already in the early twentieth century European artists and composers actively turned toward these sources. One can recall Wassily Kandinsky’s interest in theosophy and Eastern philosophy, Paul Klee’s engagement with calligraphy and the logic of Arab Islamic ornament, the influence of Japanese woodblock prints on European modernism, and later John Cage’s fascination with Zen Buddhism which radicallytransformed the very understanding of silence and structure in music. In all these cases we see a similar shift, where art begins to be conceived not as representation of the world but as a space in which form points to something beyond itself.
If abstraction is viewed through this prism, it acquires a different historical significance. Rather than being exclusively a modernist reduction of painterly language abstraction may be understood as a philosophical strategy. In such an expanded context the works of Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), Agnes Martin (1912–2004), Lee Ufan (b.1936 ), and Zibeyda Seyidova (b.1998 ) can be read not merely as formal experiments but as different approaches to the same fundamental question how painting may point toward meaning without turning it into an image.
Malevich’s Suprematism is perhaps the most radical attempt to sever painting from representation. With the Black Square (1915) the canvas becomes a space of negation. He described this gesture as a liberation of painting from the “dead weight of the real world, ”and it is also a figurative gesture of “the end of painting.” The square functions not so much as a geometric figure but as a conceptual point at which painting ceases to depict objects and begins to address the conditions of perception itself.
Agnes Martin investigates the same problem through different means. Where Malevich uses contrast and decisive geometric statements, Martin works through almost imperceptible repetition and extreme delicacy. Her grids, composed of the thinnest pencil lines and soft color fields, produce a state of perception that is slower, almost meditative. Martin herself often rejected metaphysical interpretations of her work, yet the philosophical consequences of her practice remain evident. Her paintings create a situation of perceptual suspension in which the viewer becomes aware of the limits of vision.
A similar tension between presence and absence can also be observed in the work of Lee Ufan. His paintings often consist of a single brushstroke or a sequence of fading marks on a white ground. For Lee the painting is not an autonomous object but an event of encounter between material, gesture and viewer. The mark does not depict anything; it records a moment of relation.
Within this expanded genealogy the painting of Zibeyda Seyidova can be understood as a contemporary continuation of the same philosophical inquiry. Her works are characterised by dense material surfaces and restrained geometry light, sometimes on the contrary dark, fields intersected by diagonals. Tonal transitions produced through the layered application ofoil paint. While many of Seyidova’s contemporaries choose other media for spatial investigations, installations for example, one might recall Robert Irwin, not exactly her contemporary but nevertheless relevant, Seyidova insists on oil painting. It gives the impression that this choice is made not simply because oil is the most articulate material capable of conveying subtle spatial relations, but rather as a kind of puzzle she sets for herself, how with perhaps not the most obvious medium one might produce depth and reveal relationships between planes. In this sense she shares something with Rumi, a limitation of means. Rumi attempts to speak about the absolute through words even though silence might perhaps do more. Seyidova chooses oil painting in an attempt to approach the infinity of space.
What distinguishes Seyidova’s practice from previous forms of abstraction is precisely this combination of material density of paint and spatial openness. Malevich sought transcendence through reduction. Martin pursued a similar effect through repetition and the near dissolution of structure. Lee Ufan emphasised the encounter between gesture and emptiness.
In an era of visual culture based on the instant consumption of images such a strategy acquires particular significance. It is not by accident that Pinterest is flooded with minimalist interiors, of which Kim Kardashian has become the queen, and whose house was designed by Axel Vervoordt. An entire team of trendsetters works for Kim and they have certainly studied the question of “demand.
” Contemporary images are designed for speed, for immediate recognition and rapid disappearance within an endless stream of visual signals. Clarity of images, epicness in every frame, and as a result we are left with an “impersonalized astonishment.”
In the works of Malevich, Martin, Lee Ufan and Seyidova the same question repeatedly appears, how can form point beyond itself without becoming representation.
At this point there should appear a paragraph which, according to literary tradition of texts, should calm the reader, leaving him/her satisfied with all questions answered, fed and entertained, with all gestalts closed, as mass culture usually does. Instead, what remains here is an open form. One that may provoke irritation or confusion.
Learn from the best.
–
Text by Anastasiia Garnova
Art critic, curator and research associate at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia, contributor at Arte&Lusso magazine, ZIMA magazine, MASTERS magazine, and the Hermitage magazine.
