gold square
(ceci n’est pas malevitch)

2026, —

medium
painting
materials
acrylic, gold leaf, canvas
format
small-format paintings
status
ongoing

Gold Square (ceci n’est pas Malevitch) is an evolving series of small-format paintings constructed around gilded grounds onto which portraits and compositions are staged. The works engage with abstraction, devotional iconography, and the painted relic, positioning the gold square simultaneously as image, object, and pictorial structure.

The gilded surface operates as field, frame, and reflective threshold. It is at once material ground and symbolic device: a surface associated with illumination, sanctity, value, and preservation, while also recalling the autonomous geometric field of modernist abstraction. Against this ground, figurative elements are placed, creating a tension between representation and abstraction, image and object, presence and projection.

Through repetition and variation, the series examines the unstable status of the painted image. Portraits and compositions oscillate between depiction and apparition, while the gold ground alternately contains, frames, reflects, and transforms what is placed upon it. The works consider how an image acquires meaning through its material conditions, and how representation can move between object, symbol, devotional image, and psychological space.

The title references both René Magritte’s “ceci n’est pas une pipe” (The Treachery of Images, 1929) and Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915), bringing together questions of representation and the status of the image. While Magritte reminds us that an image is not the thing it represents, Malevich’s square becomes an autonomous image and object. Gold Square returns the square to a figurative context, using the gilded ground as a space between icon, abstraction, and portraiture. The series asks what happens when an abstract field, initially conceived as an image in its own right, becomes once again a ground for representation.