Is a Black Square Art? Kazimir Malevich's Revolutionary Answer
Is Malevich's 'Black Square' merely a painting, or is it the ultimate declaration of artistic freedom? Dive into its radical philosophy and lasting impact on modern art.
So, What’s the Big Deal with a Black Square? On Malevich, Suprematism, and the Art of Nothing
You've probably seen it. A stark, black square on a white field. Maybe you scrolled past it online, or caught a glimpse of it in a textbook, and thought, "Come on. My kid could do that." I get it. The first time I saw Kazimir Malevich's Black Square, I wasn't standing in a hushed gallery; I was staring at a grainy JPEG on a library computer, squinting and thinking it was some kind of placeholder image that hadn't loaded properly. It felt like a prank, a cosmic joke at the expense of every artist who ever painstakingly mixed a color or tried to capture the light just right. But that's the very genius of it. It confronts you with your own assumptions about what art is supposed to be, and in that moment of confused dismissal, it plants a seed of radical doubt.
Just as influential movements like Constructivism and De Stijl distilled form and color to their essence, Malevich pushed this concept to its ultimate limit with the Black Square. Here, you can see how geometric abstraction was taking over the world around the same time Malevich was developing Suprematism, from theatre sets to architecture. This visual connection helps us grasp just how widespread this appetite for geometric purity really was, and why Malevich's final gesture felt both inevitable and revolutionary.
It's a bit like the story of calculus, which Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz both discovered independently around the same time. Great ideas rarely emerge in a vacuum. They're like a wave, building in the cultural ocean, waiting for the right person in the right place to finally crest. Malevich was simply the vessel for that crest, the one who had the audacity to follow the logic of geometry to its absolute, inescapable conclusion.
But here's the thing: that seemingly empty, audacious square is arguably the most important, and certainly one of the most radical, paintings of the 20th century. It’s not a picture of something. It’s a picture about something, about the very nature of what it means to exist, to perceive, and to create. It’s the ground zero of abstract art, a declaration of independence from the visible world, and a philosophical Pandora’s box dressed in the simplest of geometric clothing. It marks a point of no return, after which the very definition of art was irrevocably changed.
This isn't just art history; it's cultural neuroscience. The painting acts as a Rorschach test for our own biases. Do you see a dead end or a new beginning? An arrogant prank or a profound truth? Your answer probably says more about you than it does about the painting. I find that fascinating.
This article is my attempt to unpack the universe hiding within that simple shape. We'll dive into the mind of its creator, explore the revolutionary art movement it spawned, trace its ghost in everything from architecture to your smartphone's UI, and maybe, by the end, you’ll look at that black square and feel the tectonic plates of art history shifting right there in your lap. Strap in.
The Man Behind the Void: Kazimir Malevich
To understand the square, you have to understand the man who dared to paint it. Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) was a Polish-Russian artist who tore through the 20th century like a comet. His journey wasn't a linear path toward abstraction; it was more like a series of explosions. He didn't just reject the past; he systematically incinerated every artistic movement he passed through, using each one as a stepping stone and then gleefully leaving it in ashes. This wasn't malicious destruction; it was the necessary process of a mind desperately trying to reach a destination beyond the visible world, a place where art was not a picture of reality, but a new reality in itself.
He began his career with Impressionism, trying to capture the fleeting effects of light. But capturing the world as it appeared was never going to be enough for him. He soon dove headfirst into Russian folk art, with its bold, flat shapes and symbolic colors, which felt more honest and direct than the impressionistic style. This was followed by a passionate, almost violent, affair with Cubism and Futurism. He watched as Picasso and Braque fractured reality, and the Italian Futurists worshiped the machine and its motion. He devoured these ideas, merging them into what he called his "Cubo-Futurist" phase, creating works of jarring, intersecting planes that mimicked the fragmented energy of modern life.
It's tempting to file Malevich away as a solitary, abstract genius, but it also helps to see his work within a broader conversation. Around the same time in the Netherlands, De Stijl artists like Piet Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld were arriving at their own form of geometric purity. While their goals were different—creating a universal visual harmony rather than a "zero point"—the parallel is striking. It creates this fascinating "chicken or the egg" question in art history. Were these ideas just floating in the ether, waiting to be discovered? Or was it simply that artists across Europe, faced with the chaos of the modern world, arrived at the same conclusion: that truth, order, and meaning could be found in the most basic geometric forms? I suspect the answer is a bit of both. Movements like De Stijl and Constructivism weren't copying Malevich; they were all responding to the same tectonic shift in human consciousness, each finding their own path to the same essential truth of geometry.
But here's the twist: with each movement, Malevich was relentlessly paring down. He was searching for something beyond the visible world, something more fundamental. He was like a sculptor chipping away at a block of marble, not to find a figure inside, but to see what was left when there was no figure at all. The paintings from this period show this trajectory clearly: recognizable figures slowly dissolve into a frenetic jumble of angular, intersecting planes. He was slowly deleting the world from his canvases.
This journey culminated in the ultimate act of artistic reduction. In 1915, for the 0.10 The Last Futurist Exhibition in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), he hung a single, small painting in the corner of the room—the place where Russian families traditionally hung their religious icons. It was a declaration. The old icons, with their depictions of saints and saviors from another world, were dead. A new one, an icon for a godless, modern age, had taken their place. The Black Square was born.
To understand the square, you have to understand the man who dared to paint it. Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) was a Polish-Russian artist who tore through the 20th century like a comet, burning through artistic conventions as if they were cosmic debris. His journey wasn't a linear path toward abstraction; it was more like a series of explosions. He didn't just reject the past; he systematically incinerated every artistic movement he passed through, using each one as a stepping stone and then gleefully leaving it in ashes. This wasn't malicious destruction; it was the necessary process of a mind desperately trying to reach a destination beyond the visible world, a place where art was not a picture of reality, but a new reality in itself.
He began with Impressionism, trying to capture the fleeting effects of light. But capturing the world as it appeared was never going to be enough for him. He soon dove headfirst into Russian folk art, with its bold, flat shapes and symbolic colors, which felt more honest and direct. This was followed by a passionate, almost violent, affair with Cubism and Futurism. He watched as Picasso and Braque fractured reality, and the Italian Futurists worshiped the machine and its motion. He devoured these ideas, merging them into what he called his "Cubo-Futurist" phase, creating works of jarring, intersecting planes that mimicked the fragmented energy of modern life.
It's tempting to file Malevich away as a solitary, abstract genius, but it also helps to see his work within a broader conversation. Around the same time in the Netherlands, De Stijl artists like Piet Mondrian and Gerrit Rietveld were arriving at their own form of geometric purity. While their goals were different—creating a universal visual harmony rather than a "zero point"—the parallel is striking. It creates this fascinating "chicken or the egg" question in art history. Were these ideas just floating in the ether, waiting to be discovered? Or was it simply that artists across Europe, faced with the chaos of the modern world, arrived at the same conclusion: that truth, order, and meaning could be found in the most basic geometric forms? I suspect the answer is a bit of both. Movements like De Stijl and Constructivism weren't copying Malevich; they were all responding to the same tectonic shift in human consciousness, each finding their own path to the same essential truth of geometry.
But here's the twist: with each movement, Malevich was relentlessly paring down. He was searching for something beyond the visible world, something more fundamental. He was like a sculptor chipping away at a block of marble, not to find a figure inside, but to see what was left when there was no figure at all. The paintings from this period show this trajectory clearly: recognizable figures slowly dissolve into a frenetic jumble of angular, intersecting planes. He was slowly deleting the world from his canvases.
This journey culminated in the ultimate act of artistic reduction. In 1915, for the 0.10 The Last Futurist Exhibition in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), he hung a single, small painting in the corner of the room—the place where Russian families traditionally hung their religious icons. It was a declaration. The old icons, with their depictions of saints and saviors from another world, were dead. A new one, an icon for a godless, modern age, had taken their place. The Black Square was born.
The "Ism" That Wasn't a Style: Suprematism Explained
Black Square wasn't just a painting; it was the founding document of an entire philosophy of art, which Malevich named Suprematism. The name might sound a bit severe, but at its heart, it's a deeply romantic, almost spiritual idea: the belief that pure feeling is the most important thing in the universe. In plain English? He believed that the feeling a painting generates is more important than the thing it's a picture of. Think about that for a second. It's the ultimate switcheroo. For centuries, art was about telling a story or capturing a likeness. Art was a window to somewhere else, a narrative, a portrait, a landscape. For Malevich, the window itself was the problem. He wanted to break the glass and make you aware of the wall it was set in. He wanted to create a direct line from the canvas to your nervous system, bypassing the filter of recognizable objects entirely. It's about the sensation of weightlessness, the tension of opposites, the quiet hum of the universe—all communicated through pure form.
This idea—that art is a conduit for pure sensation—isn't as remote as it sounds. Think about music. You don't need to know what a symphony is "about" to feel its sorrow or its triumph. It operates on you directly, bypassing language and logic. Malevich wanted to do for the eyes what composers do for the ears. He wanted to create a language of feeling that existed before—and beyond—words.
This wasn't about making pretty pictures for a living room wall. This was a radical, almost mystical pursuit. Malevich saw the world of objects, or 'the baggage of the objective world,' as he called it, as a kind of cage, distracting us from a deeper, more profound reality. His goal was to break free, to achieve a state of 'non-objective' creation. And the tools he used for this jailbreak were the most basic ones imaginable:
The geometric clarity seen in movements like De Stijl was in the very air Malevich was breathing. While these artists applied geometry to create a new visual order in design and architecture, Malevich was asking a far more radical question: What happens when you remove the object and the design entirely, leaving only the most basic essence of feeling and form? The Black Square was his answer.
- Pure Geometric Forms: The square, the circle, the cross, the rectangle.
- A Limited Palette: Often just black, white, red, and sometimes a little blue or green. He wasn't interested in the subtlety of a sunset; he wanted the punch of a primary color.
- Dynamic Composition: These shapes weren't just plopped onto the canvas. Malevich was obsessed with the "weight" of color and the "feeling of movement" created by placing a heavy black square near a lighter red circle. He was directing a silent, visual orchestra.
The Evolution of Suprematism: From Black to White
Suprematism didn't stand still. It had its own life cycle, evolving in distinct phases that are crucial for understanding its full impact.
- The Black Phase (1915): This is the phase everyone knows, dominated by the stark power of the Black Square and its companion pieces, Black Circle and Black Cross. It's the "ground zero" moment, the big bang. The message was pure declaration: "This is it. This is all that's left when you strip everything else away." While visually stark, it is perhaps the most conceptually dense period of the movement.
- The Color Phase (c. 1916-1917): After the initial shock, Malevich and his followers (like Olga Rozanova and Ivan Kliun) started introducing more color and dynamism. This is where you see the iconic floating shapes—red rectangles, blue quadrangles, yellow crosses—all suspended in a white void. The paintings became more complex, almost like diagrams of celestial mechanics, with forms that seem to be repelling or attracting each other. They were less about negation and more about exploring a new kind of spatial reality. This phase is where Suprematism truly explored the potential of its new language, focusing on the concept of 'weightlessness' or 'dynamic suspension.'
- The White on White Phase (c. 1918): This is the logical, and perhaps most radical, endpoint. If Suprematism was about pure feeling and the absence of the object, then why use color at all? In his White on White series, Malevich painted a faint, off-white square on a slightly different white background. It's a painting that almost dissolves before your eyes. It's the culmination of the journey: not just the absence of the object, but the near-absence of painting itself. It is the ultimate philosophical statement, a whispered secret rather than a shouted declaration.
The Zero Point of Painting: What Black Square Actually Is
Before we dive into the philosophy, let's get literal. What are we actually looking at? Painted in 1915, Black Square (its full, bombastic title is Black Square and Red Square, but the black one stole the show) is a modest-sized canvas, about 79.5 cm by 79.5 cm. Malevich didn't stretch the canvas in the traditional way; there are visible brushstrokes (some even say you can see the faint ghost of an underlying painting, a fact the artist himself acknowledged). The square itself isn't a perfect geometric form rendered by a machine. It's a slightly irregular quadrilateral painted in a flat, non-glossy black. It's hand-made, and its flaws are what make it a human artifact, not a sterile corporate logo. This is crucial because it reminds us that this "zero point" was a deeply personal, handmade revolution.
The language of geometry, pioneered by artists like Malevich, soon escaped the confines of the canvas. It's incredible how quickly these abstract ideas found their way into the world around us, transforming the design of everyday life. While a Suprematist painting might seem purely philosophical, its DNA is visible in modern architecture, graphic design, and even interior décor. This staircase, with its bold geometric patterns, shows that the spirit of radical abstraction isn't confined to museums—it's the wallpaper of the modern world.
It’s also essential to remember that the Black Square was not a single, precious object. Malevich painted at least four known versions throughout his life, each existing in a slightly different state of decay. He understood that the idea was more important than the physical perfection of the object. This is a key distinction, one that separates him from traditional masters. He was not creating a singular masterpiece to be enshrined, but a concept to be displayed. The fact that the black pigment has cracked over time, revealing hints of the underlying layers of paint (a phenomenon known as craquelure), is, in a way, the perfect metaphor for the work itself: a simple, monolithic statement that, upon closer inspection, reveals a world of complexity and depth underneath.
So why is this hand-made irregularity so crucial? Because it shatters the last illusion. Before this, artists rebelled against showing perspective, realistic color, or clear figures. But no one had dared to rebel against the fundamental Western idea that a painting was a window into another world. Even the wildest Cubist or Futurist painting was still, in some way, a representation of things from our world. Black Square wasn't. It was the first painting to be purely about itself: shape, color, and their relationship to the canvas.
This moment is what Malevich called the "zero point of painting." Think of it as the art-historical equivalent of hitting the reset button on a video game console. It was the point at which art had been stripped of everything—story, religion, object, even literal emotion—until only its most essential, abstract elements remained. From this zero, he believed, a new world of pure feeling and sensation could be built. Think of the Black Square not as an ending, but as a launch pad. He wasn't making a painting; he was clearing a space for a new kind of consciousness to emerge.
The Shockwave: How Black Square Changed Everything
You can't talk about a revolution without looking at the destruction it leaves in its wake. Malevich's act of reduction didn't just create a new style; it fundamentally broke the art world's brain, forcing a schism that would define the next century of creativity. It was the pebble that started an avalanche, and the effects were felt across disciplines.
Smashing the Window: The End of Illusionism
For roughly 500 years, since the Renaissance perfected the rules of linear perspective, the primary goal of a painting was to create a convincing illusion—a "window" onto a fictional world. Artists prided themselves on tricking the eye. Black Square walked up to that window and put a brick through it. It wasn't an illusion of anything; it was a stubborn, physical fact. Suddenly, the painting wasn't a portal to another place, but an object in its own right, existing in the same space as the viewer. This shift from illusion to reality is perhaps the single most important legacy of the square. It made the canvas itself the subject, a radical idea that paved the way for everything from Minimalism to the "zip" paintings of Barnett Newman.
The Rise and Fall: Suprematism and the Soviet State
The story of Black Square is inseparable from the tumultuous history of early 20th-century Russia. It was born in the ferment of the Russian avant-garde, just before the 1917 Revolution. For a brief, glorious moment, Malevich and his ideas were seen as the perfect aesthetic for a new, revolutionary world. It was abstract, futuristic, and broke with the bourgeois past. Malevich was appointed to teaching positions, and his theories were debated passionately. But as the Soviet Union under Stalin consolidated power, the winds shifted. The state began promoting a much safer, more literal art form: Socialist Realism, which demanded heroic, easily understandable images of workers and achievement. Suprematism, with its "bourgeois formalism" and its rejection of recognizable content, was now seen as elitist, hostile, and dangerous. Malevich's work was banned, his publications ceased, and he was forced to return to a more figurative style to survive. He died in relative obscurity in 1935, a titan brought low by a regime that demanded art as propaganda, not philosophy. It's a haunting reminder that radical ideas often thrive in chaos but are the first casualties of authoritarian control.
There's a particularly poignant irony here. While Malevich's art was condemned as "bourgeois," his goal was the complete opposite. He was trying to create an art that was universally accessible on a pre-rational, emotional level. He wanted to strip art of the cultural baggage and elite knowledge required to "understand" a historical or mythological painting. The Black Square was, in his view, the most democratic of all objects: a pure feeling that anyone, regardless of their education or class, could experience. That the Soviet state saw this as elitist is one of the tragic misunderstandings in the history of art.
Suprematism's Secret Children: From Russia to Your Screen
The physical paintings might have been hidden away, but ideas are bulletproof. In the 1920s, El Lissitzky, a student and collaborator of Malevich, took the principles of Suprematism to Germany. He called his own variation "Proun," and through him, the DNA of geometric abstraction was injected directly into the heart of European modernism. The influence was seismic and flowed in many directions.
The Bauhaus and the Language of Design
The Bauhaus, the legendary German design school, became a major vector for Suprematist ideas. The Bauhaus credo was "form follows function," and Malevich's reduction to pure geometric form was a perfect fit. The core principles of modern design—grid systems, bold primary colors, sans-serif typography, and the rejection of ornamental clutter—are direct descendants of the Suprematist project. When you look at a piece of Bauhaus furniture or a poster by Herbert Bayer, you are looking at Suprematism adapted for a functional purpose.
Modern Art off the Rails
The influence on other artists was just as profound. When Kazimir Malevich painted his square, it sent a shockwave through the art world, but it landed differently for different artists. For some, it was a line in the sand they refused to cross, an intellectual dead end. For others, it was the permission slip they needed to venture into uncharted territory. This division—between those who saw it as an end and those who saw it as a beginning—is precisely what makes it so pivotal. It was a catalyst, forcing every artist who encountered it to pick a side in the great debate of what art could and should be.
A Counterpoint: Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917)
Just two years after Black Square, Marcel Duchamp presented his infamous urinal, Fountain. While both works are revolutionary and aim to redefine art, they represent opposite poles of the same argument. Malevich was a mystic; he believed in the spiritual supremacy of pure feeling through pure form. Duchamp was an intellectual; he believed that art resided not in the object's form or the artist's feeling, but in the context and the idea behind it. If Malevich was asking, "What is the most essential form of art?" Duchamp was asking, "What even is art in the first place?" One pushed painting to its absolute limit; the other declared the entire concept of painting as just another antique. Their back-to-back arrival is one of the most fascinating "what if" moments in art history.
It's the ultimate philosophical showdown of the 20th century. Malevich, the true believer, sought a higher, purer reality through art. Duchamp, the skeptic, used art to question the very systems of value and meaning that underpinned it. To put it crudely: Malevich wanted to show you God; Duchamp wanted to show you that God was just a word we made up. This fundamental tension between the spiritual and the conceptual is a divide that runs through the entire landscape of modern and contemporary art, and its origins can be traced right back to this moment.
The Abstract Expressionist Echo
Two decades later, in 1940s New York, the Abstract Expressionists were grappling with how to create art after the horrors of World War II. Artists like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman found a kindred spirit in Malevich. They, too, sought a universal, transcendent experience. Rothko's hovering, emotional color fields and Newman's stark vertical "zips" on vast canvases are a direct continuation of the spiritual quest that began with Black Square. They weren't painting squares, but they were chasing the same feeling of the sublime. And Jackson Pollock? His drip paintings take Malevich's rejection of the object to its logical conclusion: the painting is a pure record of an action, a moment in time, with no object to represent at all.
Your Daily Dose of Malevich: The Influence Today
You don't need to visit a museum to see the legacy of Suprematism. It's in your pocket and on your screen.
- Graphic User Interfaces (GUI): The icons on your smartphone, the layouts of your favorite websites, and the interfaces of your apps—the grid-based design, the simple geometric shapes, the flat colors—are all built on the visual language that Malevich helped invent. He helped teach the world to communicate information through pure form.
- Architecture and Design: From the clean lines of a modern office building to the minimalist aesthetic of a piece of Scandinavian furniture, the spirit of reduction and geometric clarity is a ghost that haunts modern design. Architects like Zaha Hadid created buildings that feel like Suprematist compositions brought to life in steel and concrete.
- Fashion: Geometric patterns, bold color blocking, and the minimalist aesthetic of designers from Coco Chanel to the present day owe a tangible debt. While fashion often focuses on the body, its use of color and form in a non-representational way shares a common ancestor with the Suprematist canvas.
- Branding and Identity: The most powerful corporate logos are often the simplest. Think of the Nike swoosh, the Adidas three stripes, or the rectangular flags of the Windows logo. The ability to communicate a global identity through an abstract geometric symbol is a Suprematist victory, even if it's one Malevich himself might have found grimly ironic.
Beyond the Canvas: The Radical Legacy of Nothing
It's easy to look at a black square and see an ending, a nihilistic full stop. But that misses the point entirely. The true legacy of Black Square is not the void it depicts, but the infinite possibilities it unlocked. By clearing away the old rules, it created a space where anything could happen. It was the hard reset that allowed 20th-century art to be born. Every time an artist chooses to focus on form over content, on feeling over figure, or even on an idea over an object, they are working in the vast new territory that Malevich's brave, stubborn square first staked out. It wasn't the death of painting; it was the sound of it exhaling, making space for a century of radical new breaths.
I find myself coming back to it again and again. Not because it's beautiful, but because it's honest. It's the visual equivalent of a single, clear musical note that rings out, silencing the noise so something else—something new and unimagined—can finally be heard.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Why is a black square considered high art?
It's a fair question, and one that gets to the heart of modern art. The Black Square isn't valued for its technical skill or because it's "pretty." Its value lies in being a radical idea and a historical turning point. It's a philosophical argument made visual. Before it, art was mostly about representing reality. After it, art could be about itself—its own colors, shapes, and the feelings they create. In that sense, it's not just a painting; it's a key that unlocked countless doors in the rooms of art history.
What did Malevich mean by the "zero point of painting"?
The "zero point" was Malevich's term for the moment he believed he had reduced art to its absolute, non-negotiable essence. He spent years stripping away recognizable objects, religious meaning, and narrative storytelling. With Black Square, he felt he had arrived at a ground zero—a point where nothing was left but the most basic elements of painting: a form and a color on a canvas. Think of it as a philosophical ground zero, the blank slate from which a completely new form of art—based purely on feeling—could be built.
What is the main idea of Suprematism?
Suprematism's main idea is the "supremacy of pure feeling" in art. Malevich believed that the sensations a painting could evoke were more important than depicting any object from the real world. He wanted to create a direct emotional or even spiritual experience for the viewer, untainted by having to recognize a person, a place, or a story. He used basic geometric forms because he saw them as universal and free from the cultural baggage of recognizable imagery.
Are there other versions of the Black Square? What happened to the original?
Yes, there are several versions. The original from 1915 was the centerpiece of the 0.10 The Last Futurist Exhibition. Over the years, Malevich created at least three other known versions as the first one began to deteriorate. The paintings were often made with experimental materials and house paint, not archival oils, so they are famously fragile. The original is particularly famous for the cracks, or craquelure, that have formed in the black pigment over time. This fragility is part of its story—a monumental idea in a fragile, human-made object.
What's the difference between Suprematism and De Stijl?
This is a fantastic question that highlights a key moment in art history. Both movements began around the same time and both used pure geometric abstraction. However, their goals were quite different.
Feature  | Suprematism (Malevich) | De Stijl (Mondrian, van Doesburg) |
|---|---|---|
| Core Idea | The supremacy of pure feeling. A spiritual quest. | The search for universal harmony. A search for visual truth. |
| Language | Dynamic forms, off-axis compositions, focus on weight and tension. | Strict horizontal and vertical lines, the right angle, static balance. |
| Palette | Usually black, white, red; expanded to other colors in later phases. | Strictly primary colors (red, blue, yellow) plus black, white, and gray. |
| Focus | Internal, mystical, emotional. | External, idealistic, structural. |
Think of it this way: Suprematism was about the feeling in your gut, while De Stijl was about the mathematical order of the universe.
How did Black Square influence modern and contemporary art?
Its influence is vast and ongoing. You can trace its impact in several major ways:
- Abstract Art: It is the foundational text for non-representational painting. Every abstract artist who followed worked in its shadow.
- Minimalism: The Minimalist artists of the 1960s were deeply indebted to Malevich. His focus on the painting as a simple object, not an illusion, is the starting point for their entire philosophy.
- Conceptual Art: While different in spirit, Malevich's elevation of the idea of the painting over its visual qualities helped pave the way for Conceptual Art, where the idea is paramount.
- Modern Design: The visual language of pure geometry that Malevich pioneered became the backbone of 20th-century graphic design, architecture, and product design, influencing everything from the Bauhaus to the iPhone.
It's not an exaggeration to say that every abstract shape, every bold color field, and every minimalist logo you see today is an indirect conversation with that original black square.