Samovar 1913

Kazimir Malevich made this painting, Samovar, using oils, imagining and then building up the composition, plane by plane, and triangle by triangle. I can almost feel Malevich deciding what to put where, and the decisions seem so thought out. It's as if he's working through a problem: how do you represent an everyday object in a new pictorial language? The painting is like a puzzle made up of geometric forms and muted, earthy colors. There is a real conversation going on between the shapes, they are bumping up against each other and creating new forms. I'm always struck by the way artists build on each other's ideas across time. Malevich takes on the flattened perspective that we see in Cezanne, but he goes even further, pushing it to near abstraction. To me, painting is just this constant back and forth, a messy conversation where we try to make sense of the world. I love the not-knowing and the space that painting opens up for us to imagine and feel differently.