The painting Black Square Shifted to the left ( 60 x 50 cm, oil on canvas, 1974, Zimmerli Art Museum) was the first piece from the black and white series of paintings, which was subsequently expanded over a period of almost thirty years. Within this widely developed body of the series, this particular piece has a purely paradigmatic character.

It suggests that with the appearance of Malevich’s Black Square, an image (within art), which had always been devoted to the representation of various possible forms of presence (raised within our consciousness), had fulfilled this mission. After this painting, after this borderline, every image (all kinds of signifiers of presence within art) must be seen and understood henceforward by the creative consciousness (also retrospectively) as something pointing towards absence/void.* Here and from this moment onwards, Martin Heidergger’s statement - “the void can be seen only via presence” – becomes practice. After the Black Square found the gate – any presence of an image in art serves a new goal – to create a chance for us to sense and to articulate absence, emptiness, the void.

One can even say more generally perhaps that after the Black Square the artwork constitutes evidence of absence and not evidence of presence. After the Black Square and thanks to it (it feed human consciousness from being deceived), art images are no longer “objective facts” of independent and hermetic values of presence within presence (at least they should not be understood in this way any more), but rather merely a concept of the concept of the void.

In the painting Black Square Shifted to the Rubicon, the fortress of presence – is removed from the central part of the painting where creative operations normally take place. Because this place is now fully dedicated to a pure and detached void (fulfilled emptiness), every signifier entering this space becomes a prayer to the void and the art images within this space must be understood as the debris of the limitless.

The Black Square Shifted to the Left within an unconventional time directly follows the Black Square of Malevich – it comments upon and opens the gate (discovered by the Black Square), which still remained shut.

Black Square Shifted to the Left whispers in our ear that the art image didn’t complete its own mission but fundamentally changed it, began a new attempt: to show the world from another shore – from the shore called “void”.

Gia Edzgveradze, 1991

*Many advanced contemporary artists clearly and consciously began to orientate their art in this direction – the best example of this approach is Andy Warhol.