Black cross on a red oval 1927

Kazimir Malevich made this painting, Black cross on a red oval, with oil on canvas, and it's so direct, so reduced! Look at how the black cross sits slightly off-center on that vibrant red oval, all floating on this off-white ground. The colours are so loaded with symbolic potential, yet he lays them down with a real casualness. There is a smaller black line too. It’s like he's saying, ‘Here are the basic shapes, the basic colours. Now, *you* figure it out.’ The surface has a bit of tooth to it, you can see the marks, the paint isn't trying to pretend it's anything other than what it is: a layer of stuff applied to a surface. I love how the starkness of the composition gets softened by that roughness; the idea of perfection, of the ideal form, is challenged by the physical reality of the paint. It is almost like Ad Reinhardt or Barnett Newman, these reduced abstract forms, but something much weirder. Malevich throws open a door to a whole new world, and invites us to step right through.