Art - Ned Denny explores the infinite possibilities of emptiness and absence

In Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), the artist and theoretician Wassily Kandinsky devotes a brief paragraph to the properties of white. The colour white, he says, is like one of those pauses in a piece of music where the mind draws breath, not the dead and final silence implied by black but rather one "pregnant with possibilities". At the same time, he seems to suggest that an expanse of white evokes an exalted zone that is beyond our understanding, whose harmonies our senses aren't tuned to receive. This chaste and supernal whiteness, he concludes, "has the appeal of the nothingness that is before birth, of the world in the ice age".

For all that his book envisages the emergence of a new, cerebral, non-representational form of painting, even Kandinsky doesn't appear to consider that this polar world could realistically be pictured. After all, who'd want to look at a blank canvas? And yet Kasimir Malevich's Suprematism (White on White) (1918), painted less than a decade later and currently on display at the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, is just such a work.

Like Kandinsky, Malevich wanted painting to be something other than the stale trick of naturalism. In 1915, he had published the manifesto of the movement he named Suprematism, decrying those who "reproduce beloved objects and little corners of nature" and calling for the birth of "a work of pure, living art". The origins of this new art is his famous Black Suprematist Square (1914-15), a painting that consists - brutally, unforgettably - of nothing more than a black block on a white ground, a chunk of dark matter charged with latent energy. A secularicon for the age of nuclear physics, Malevich's black square was an act of both destruction and of creation.

But by the time of Suprematism (White on White), things aren't looking quite so clear cut. Gone are the brightly confident geometries of the early Suprematist works, and in their place we see greyish-white blocks half-submerged in a creamy-white bareness, like a marble tower slipping into milk. If the black square had seemed to assert the invincibility of matter, here we see the opposite and complementary truth - of dissolution, of space. Malevich depicts the void that laps at the side of things, and in so doing makes an almost entirely white canvas bewitching.

Back in London, you can see the work of two of Malevich's putative heirs. The Italian artist Piero Manzoni, a selection of whose "achromes" are showing at Sprovieri, goes one step further and abolishes composition altogether. The old fictions of abstraction, allusion and self-expression, he argued in his 1960 essay "Free Dimension", are outmoded and irrelevant. He recommends, rather, that the artist empty his works entirely in order to arrive at "the unlimited meaning of total space, of pure and absolute light". His project recalls that perennial theme in Chinese poetry where a pupil goes to visit a holy man in the mountains and finds nobody at home. Encountering absence where we expect incident or instruction, we realise that, in Manzoni's words, "there is only to be, to live". Even so, he stops short of the untouched canvas. Instead, his achromes become an exploration of the tactile possibilities of emptiness, from sliced and stitched felt to canvas wrinkled like bedsheets to sections of cotton or fur. Because when you think about it, why should that sacred void be something chaste and austere? Why shouldn't it be soft or warped or abrasive?

But if whiteness can be as esoteric as a Malevich or as sensuous as a Manzoni, it can also be less than compelling. The American painter Robert Ryman, currently showing at Haunch of Venison, has made a career out of square, Persil-bright pictures that epitomise the way that abstraction has been tamed and domesticated in recent decades. You just need to bring to mind the great white-on-white paintings of Ryman's fellow American Barnett Newman to remember how commanding an abstract work can be. But whereas Newman's The Name II (1950) is as coolly majestic as the mythical White Goddess (of whom Robert Graves wrote: "All saints revile her, and all sober men"), Ryman's new pictures are more redolent of patches of semi-plastered wall. And it seems to me that, on the contrary, the work of an abstract artist should always match Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa for urgency and wonder. Even if he is painting nothing.

"Malevich from the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam" is at Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (00 33 153 67 40 00) until 15 April. "Piero Manzoni: achromes" is at Sprovieri, W1 (020 7734 2066) until 30 March. "Robert Ryman" is at Haunch of Venison, W1 (020 7495 5050) until 1 March

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website