The First Reduction

In 1915, Kazimir Malevich says farewell. Not to art – but to an idea that had governed painting for centuries: that it must depict the world.

This farewell is not a gesture of destruction. It is a gesture of liberation. Malevich knows exactly what he is doing. He has painted the landscapes, the portraits, the still lifes. He knows the tradition – and he chooses to leave it. Deliberately. Irrevocably. With the Black Square as his letter of departure.

The Black Square depicts nothing. No landscape, no face, no thing. It is color that belongs to itself – freed from the duty to be something else. Black here is not emptiness but fullness: the absorption of all light, the condensation of all possibilities into a single moment.

Malevich calls it Suprematism – the supremacy of pure sensation over depiction. What matters is not what is depicted, but the experience of form and color themselves. The farewell to representation is the beginning of a new language – a language that does not describe, but simply is.

This first reduction opens the door for everything that follows.