Flatness

Flatness Consider the possibility of becoming a two-dimensional surface with no thickness whatsoever. No, face-down on the floor won’t get it; at best your nose will be in the way. You’ve got to get lower, closer, flounder-like, melting into a puddle of candle wax, or better yet become a film of water whose shapes and edges are defined by the shapes and edges of the surface on which you flow, merging with the waters of others to the tunes of gravity and surface tension. A bit difficult to contemplate, isn’t it, something like the frustration of attempting to fathom the edges of the universe? • Painters live on the flat surface. Malevich, for instance, was in love with the geometry and mathematics of planes, the possible play of plane on plane, so much so that his tombstone was a thin, flat square of black marble, his grave now lost, existing only in period photographs. Death is always loss, not always being lost. But I digress, again... Painterly genius can bring life to the otherwise neutral geometricity of the plane such as do Avery’s skims of fleshy orange and black paint on his canvas of a nude woman in a black robe. She’s featureless yet sensual in her flatness, formless but rich in shape, certain elements of her body defined by only the shallowest possible suggestion of the space that might exist were a slip of paper laid atop another of the same color. The volumes of her body are reduced to outline such that her left breast vanishes into the surface of her body, as do the swells and valleys of her belly, arms and legs, only to emerge oh so slightly in the faint roundness of her featureless face. The cutout black-mass drapery of her robe, itself all but alive, encloses her body as she leans to the right, levitating, supported by nothing. She’s looking directly at me; I’m certain of it. I can feel the worldly otherness of her invisible gaze, read the erotic boredom of her pose, the elsewhere quality of her thoughts, Avery’s thoughts, the clarity of his abstraction, the genius of her simplicity, the unlimited virtue to be found in achieving flatness for the sake of flatness. http://pintura.aut.org/SearchProducto?Produnum=100674 http://www.davistownmuseum.org/bioMiltonAvery.html https://www.google.com/search?q=Malevich&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=SlyvUevODorXygHY9IDQBw&ved=0CAoQ_AUoAQ&biw=1150&bih=585