MOMus - Museum of Modern Art - Costakis Collection Thessaloniki, Greece
Abstraction (Rupture) by Alexander Rodchenko was made in 1920. This was a time when Russia was undergoing massive social change. These changes were reflected in visual art as well; changes were seen in works of Rodechenko and his contemporaries. Accordingly, Rodchenko's work "Abstraction (Rupture)" was made by him in a transitory phase of his life. This work belongs to his experimental phase-1918-1921, just before his famous declaration that painting had reached its logical conclusion through the work "Pure Red Colour, Pure Blue Colour and Pure Yellow Colour". During this transitional period Rodchenko had made a series of paintings revolving around the themes of fundamentals of painting like line, colour, texture and composition. An instance of such experimentation is the above work. We see a canvas, confidently smeared with different colours which seemlessly complement each other. There is a major portion of ultramarine-blue with pacthes of black, reddish brown, green and yellow ochre. There's a white part left uncoloured in the centre, below. This merges with blues, above, making it seem like a pause in the flow, literally reflecting the title-word "rupture". Similar abstract compostions preceded and followed this one. Soon after, Rodchenko's social standing began to weigh heavy in his psyche, transforming his practice into a constructivist one. In accordance to the constructivist idelogy of art primarly being an influential and functional force, He began poster designing, graphic designing, photography and typography.
Looking at the image, the loose red-brown drips on the left feel like they're bleeding downward, almost dissolving, while the blue field above them feels heavy and enclosing. Then that stark white gap near the bottom centre breaks the tension completely where it's the one area with no gesture, no colour, just open space. I think that emptiness is the real "rupture" the title points to: not a tear in the fabric of the painting, but a pause, a breath, in the middle of otherwise dense, urgent brushwork. What I take from it is a sense of interruption within controlled chaos with the colour pressing in from all sides, but a stubborn gap of stillness holding its ground in the centre. Even without certainty about the artist, the work reads as being about tension between movement and stillness, rather than a fixed subject or scene.
