UNCREATED LIGHT AND DAZZLING DARKNESS: BYZANTIUM OF AVANT-GARDE

Avant-Garde painters were amazed by fifteenth to sixteenth century “old style” Russian icons, which saw the light of the day in the early twentieth century after two centuries of prohibition. In the seventeenth century, ascetic had been replaced by “Western” mimetic images. Icons had a massive impact on Mikhail Larionov, the founder of Rayonism, who wrote that “Russian icon painters <…> were strongly drawn towards abstraction”. In 1913 he organized an exhibition of his Rayonnist paintings with rays of light reflected from objects. Kazimir Malevich was also influenced by icons. In his theoretical writings, he refers to Gospels. Launching his Suprematism at the “0,10 Exhibition” in 1915, Malevich placed his masterpiece in the “beautiful corner”, as an icon. Alexandre Benois said that the Black Square is a “cult of emptiness, darkness, ‘nothing’”. It will be justified that it was another type of darkness, connected to the concepts of “uncreated light” and “dazzling darkness” in Dionysius the Areopagite and Gregory Palamas’ theology. I refer to Pavel Florensky and Sergey Bulgakov’s philosophy to demonstrate how an application of Palamas’ theory, hesychasm, was reflected in fifteenth-sixteenth-century icon-painting and later in Avant-Garde theory and paintings, in particular by those of Larionov and Malevich.