Kazimir Malevich, the Supplanter

Resumen

In the ’20s, Kazimir Malevich produced a series of plaster sculptures that he referred to as ‘architectons,’ which, this article argues, are not merely the architectural research of the Russian artist on the transfer from the bi-dimensionality of painting to the three-dimensionality of space. Such models belong to a rather more profound revolutionary meaning, that of the destruction of the existing society through the destruction of its architecture. In order to do that, Malevich uses the abstraction of suprematist non-objectivity to absorb the symbolic load of previous images by means of a radical strategy of appropriation based on concrete operations of ‘locating’ his work. Malevich, the supplanter, does not design forms but rather appropriates, through them, the place of others.