Ever since the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich (1879-1935) created his stark Black Square in 1915, artists have taken his image not as a final statement from which one could progress no further, but as a challenge to explore the intricacies of a perfect geometrical form in ever more subtle ways. The coloured concentric squares of Joseph Albers are famous. The contemporary English artist John Carter R.A. brings a particularly sensitive mind to the question. He works in both two dimensions and three, and sometimes his two-dimensional pieces refer directly to ones conceived in three dimensions. This example is one of a sequence teasing out the relationships of a square superimposed on a square.
It’s immediately clear that not all the ‘squares’ are strictly square. One finds oneself trying to work out which are parallelograms, which real squares at subtly tilted angles. The artist himself has been concerned that the black wedges don’t ‘read’ as voids, but as forms equivalent to the white and the blue. In other words, is it a piece that represents a three-dimensional construction, or it is quite ‘flat’?
Another ambiguity comes with the fact that not all the angles are right angles. As the title tells us, we are looking at ‘linked diagonals’, and squares are not known for their diagonals. There are in fact three perfect squares to be found in the work (the outer edge of the sheet is optically square but actually, as the dimensions betray, only approximately so). How does the inner blue square relate to the outer blue ‘square’ which, we realise, is actually a paralellogram with a square ‘opening’ which is at an angle to the square of the sheet? That angle sets in motion further angles within the square, denoted by wedges of white and black. Are those wedges voids, as the artist at first wished them to be, or are they forms in their own right, related to the squares by virtue of their angles which echo the angles of the outer paralellogram?
We then realise that the inner blue square rests neatly inside the opening in the outer blue square, its sides parallel to those of the opening. And the white square that is implied by the white wedges is exactly aligned to the outer edges of the sheet of paper itself. In fact, the only square that is precisely aligned to the sheet on which the whole thing sits, is the white one that is only implied by the white wedges. And, just to finish the design off, the outer tone is not white.
There are very ancient proofs of Pythagoras’s theorem (about the square on the hypotenuse) that involve a displaced square on the diagonal though never with the extremely acute angles that Carter introduces, or with his ‘corrective’ additional square returning the form to its original slanting position. To go back again to the title: it includes the word ‘rotation’, which reminds us that despite its quiet and very controlled appearance – and we marvel at the elegant regularity of the washes – the composition is actually in motion, unstable. It is this tension between calm stability and wilful dynamism that gives Carter’s piece its mesmerizing beauty.
