Malevich Within
In 1923, Kazimir Malevich was appointed director of Petrograd State Institute of Artistic Culture, which was forced to close in 1926 after a Communist party newspaper called it "a government-supported monastery" rife with "counterrevolutionary sermonizing and artistic debauchery." The Soviet state was promoting an idealized, propagandistic style of art called Socialist Realism. In 1930, Malevich was arrested for a short period because of his contacts in Germany. In 1933, he was accused of Formalism. Malevich returned to figurative art, and in 1935, he died of cancer in Leningrad [St. Petersburg].
The premise of this project becomes one of homage a second time - first, "My Dear Malevich" (http://tomrchambers.com/malevich_dir.html) - by utilizing paintings by Kazimir Malevich to explore at the pixel level ... via digitization ... aesthetic fields of "Pixelscapes" to rekindle his thoughts about creation, "No phenomenon is mortal, and this means not only the body but the idea as well, a symbol that one is eternally reincarnated in another form which actually exists in the conscious and unconscious person."
The selection process uses the criteria: before and after his Suprematist Period - his early works, 1903-1915 and later works, 1928-1933. His Suprematist works are not a part of the process because they speak for themselves, or in other words, they indicate this art movement focused on fundamental geometric forms and "the non-objective world".
In his book The Non-Objective World, Malevich described the inspiration which brought about the powerful image of the "Black Square": "I felt only night within me and it was then that I conceived the new art, which I called Suprematism."
The "within" as a part of his statement is an important aspect of this approach taken for these "Pixelscapes". In Chambers' opinion and at the subconscious level, Malevich's Suprematist passion and emotions were a part of him - and coming to the forefront - during his early work, and suppressed during his later work. So in a political sense, the pixel explorations indicate this passion and these emotions by looking "within" his digitized paintings to pay homage, a second time.
