Orekhov’s “Red Vertical 2022” is an homage to Kazimir Malevich. The 7 x 5 x 2 structure calls to mind a building, but in actuality is not. The ratio of width to height is close to the proportions used by Malevich in his famous painting “Red House”, which can be now found in the collection of the State Russian Museum. The dominant vertical line was perpendicular to the horizon in the middle of the Russian Plain, in the spirit of the master. The wood frame was covered with red polyethylene, its natural folds forming a picturesque relief.

‘Home’ was a reoccurring theme in Malevich’s work, dating back to 1906 when he painted the pointillist “Landscape with Yellow House”. The colour red was the leitmotif throughout Malevich’s artistic career starting in 1907, where one can notice the pomegranate shade of the bow in his “Self-portrait”. By the first half of the 1930s, it had become difficult to find works where some form of red was not important; in many paintings, it was the dominant colour.

“Red House” was created in 1932. Here, Malevich combined colour and a theme long familiar to him. However, that specific combination of colour and subject produced an alarming effect of deprivation. For the building is not just a revolutionary-coloured shack, but also a tower stripped of the usual hallmarks of life — windows and doors. Before the viewer is something which carries the shape of a building deprived of its function. “Red House” stands out from the red-roofed cottages he painted right about the same time (circa 1930), which clearly feature brush-stroked windows, or his landscapes with blooming apple trees (circa 1930), in which the rural structures also retain a traditional look.

“Red House” is a building that refused to be a dwelling, devoid of human qualities. The composition was formed from elements, a feeling of emptiness, loneliness, hopelessness of life, wrote Malevich on the reverse side of a different canvas, “Complex Presentiment” (1932), where a similar front-facing red house is pictured in the background. The visual possibilities of red, combined with the motif of the house, creates an unexpected result — the destruction of homeliness, which may reflect the artist’s state of mind in early 1930s Soviet Russia.

Gregory Orekhov translates the painting from canvas to real life, preserving that feeling of space and the reality in which the master of “Black Square” lived out the final years of his life.

Text by art critic Mikhail Sidlin