Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension

Abstract

"I paint energy, not the soul." [1] Kazimir Malevich

"Matter is not, in reality, what it appears to be … it is identical with energy and is only a manifestation of the movement of invisible and imponderable elements." [2] Camille Flammarion

The title of this exhibition responds to Ukraine-born Kazimir Malevich's well-known painting Black Square and Red Square also known as Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension (1915). The title Black Square and Red Square, like many of Malevich's titles, is prosaically descriptive. The work's other title, with its talk of colour masses, a fourth dimension, a knapsack, has always been of great interest to Ingram for the way it points to the playful, pluralist and open nature of abstract painting. Ingram is well known for making paintings with his custom-built painting machines of radio waves, electromagnetic energy, the stuff of the fourth dimension. With Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension, he takes a refreshing and surprising step.

The idea of a 'fourth dimension,' what Ingram understands via Kandinsky as an 'electric theory of matter' making up a world of invisible energy beyond the material, was widely popular at the time Malevich painted Black Square and Red Square. This stemmed from developments in physics, especially the discovery of x-rays and electromagnetic waves. Many physicists of the era firmly believed in the existence of 'the ether of space,' an omnipresent yet invisible medium that enabled the transmission of waves. This notion was picked up by occultists and philosophers of the time, who attributed many possible phenomena to its existence. According to art historian Linda Dalrymple Henderson, "For occultists, including Theosophists as well as Anthroposophy's founder Rudolf Steiner, the ether offered a powerful model both for vibratory thought transfer and for the interpenetration of spirit and matter [in] ether/matter interactions."[3] Conceptually, this extended into the idea of a 'fourth dimension,' a higher reality of which the three-dimensional world was only a small aspect or subset. Artists of the historical avant-garde, including Malevich, Kandinsky, Duchamp, and others, were highly engaged in occultist discourses, and ideas such as the existence of the ether, and the fourth dimension, were important in their thinking.

To make these works, Ingram repeatedly used the phrase "Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension" to prompt an open-source machine learning tool. This created inputs for the generation of this series of painted compositions. If much of Ingram's work engages his machines to do the painting, making generalised machinic versions of painterly traces, here, he turns the tables, seeking to paint like one of his machines. He has painted these works by hand over many hours, and the results are fascinating. In one sense, these works are non-imagistic, painted abstractions. On another, they lend themselves to viewer interpretation, showing nearly discernible images.