0.10 in 2010

In his painting 0.10 in 2010, David Diao refers to his explorations from the late 1980’s which made it possible for him to define his own artistic position. After a break of a few years caused by his disenchantment with formalism and the principle of the autonomy of the artwork postulated by the critic Clement Greenberg, the artist has returned to painting and to deliberations on the principal categories of Modernism. His painting began to include signs and motifs used by the avant garde of the 1920’s and the 1930’s. By applying an archaeology of Modernism and critically reflecting on the diverse languages of abstraction, Diao has analysed the achievements of the Russian avant garde, the De Stijl collective, and Bauhaus.

The paintings which are a breakthrough in the artist’s career come from 1984, and are a transformation of a photograph presenting the exposition of the Suprematist works by Kazimir Malevich at “0.10”, the last exhibition of the Futurists in St Petersburg in 1915. Diao did not relate to the works of Malevich directly but by means of a mediated image, thus focusing on the issue of the interdependence between the work and its reproduction. The painting from Kolekcja II is yet another attempt, made years later, at reprocessing an iconic document from the archive of art history, and is close to one of the earlier works by Diao: Black and White with Chair (1984–1988, FRAC collection in Brittany).

In 0.10 in 2010, the paintings by Malevich have been reduced to flat signs. Their arrangement has little to do with the original set up of the exhibition. The order of the expositions in St Petersburg was replaced by dispersed motifs: a chair captured in a photo, Suprematist rectangles and crosses with their transformed versions, reduced to red blots on green, stimulating the senses. In Diao’s painting, the tradition of the avant garde loses its significance, surprises with a contrast of colours typical of afterimages. Tackling the Modernist icon, the artist is above all analyzing his place in art: the smooth monochromatic background is the effect of the artist’s abandonment of the textural works he created in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The geometrical abstraction, on the other hand, is a reference to the works of Russian avant garde which served for the artist as an impulse to rethink his own painting.

Izabela Kopania