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“Ground Zero” refers to starting from scratch. In my previous “On Being Didactic” series. I enjoyed painting outside the ‘line’. Malevich, in the early 20th Century, dared to reduce painting to nothing, as described above. In this series I am freeing myself from my own dogma, which is a step in my progress as a painter.
“Alogic marked the transition from Malevich’s earlier Cézannesque and Cubist styles to Suprematism, the most radical abstraction of avant-garde painting. The well-known Black Square of 1915, a virtual icon of Suprematism, was the endpoint of this development. The black square represents nothing and it expresses nothing. It is the “ground zero” of painting, an image reduced to its most elementary components, an empty form that conveys nothing but the stamp of the painter’s hand. Such profound reductionism could not last long; gradually it gave rise to a geometrical idiom of shapes and colours, which evolved with increasing complexity through successive derivations from the elemental square. After 1918, Malevich gave up easel painting to teach, and to develop three-dimensional Suprematist works, with any eye to their possible application to architecture and the production of common objects for daily use. Then, finally, in his last years, he returned to figurative representation.” — unattributed quote
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