JAKE FREILICH

Bona Fide Trier

Roski Masters of Fine Arts Gallery

March 23 - April 4

2019

When Kazamir Malevich painted Black Square in 1915, he seemed to stretch painterly

abstraction to its inane terminus. (The painting is literally a giant black square.) Malevich

believed that his nonobjective art would lead us to a new, heightened spirituality. El Lissitzky

described it as, the “ultimate tip of the visual pyramid of perspective into infinity.” From the

safety of hindsight, the failure of Malevich’s utopic vision of art seems obvious, yet another

example of Modernism’s unfulfilled idealism.

So maybe it’s not surprising that, one hundred years after its creation, conservationists

discovered a racist joke in the underpainting of Black Square. Without outwardly changing its

appearance, the painting had transmuted into filth. Whether or not we throw Malevich’s

canonical work out with the trash is moot, the joke’s already on us. The ultimate abstract

painting was never even abstract.

Twenty years later, in 1935, following the sensational trial of Bruno Hauptmann -- the man

(maybe falsely) executed for kidnapping and murdering Lindbergh’s baby -- cameras were

banned from American courtrooms. Courtroom sketch artists found new demand since their

drawings were the sole visual record of landmark cases, upending at least in this particular

realm the usual flow of progress.

Bona Fide Trier examines recent art history as a series of contradictions, both a means of self-

actualization and a method for documentation. It questions why we still take so seriously a medium

we’ve long considered outdated. These paintings reflect on the relationship between the purpose of

their form and the purpose of the images they depict.