ART CITIES:Paris-Rudolf Polanszky

Rudolf Polanszky is considered a key figure in the Actionist and Post-Actionist movement with his conceptual oeuvre which aims to bring abstract mathematical and scientific concepts to life. His works are realized in processed and used materials such as acrylic glass, aluminum and cardboard.A key figure in the Vienna art scene, Rudolf Polanszky creates cerebral yet tactile works that embrace chance occurrence.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Gallery Archive

From the early 1990s, Rudolf Polanszky began experimenting in mixed-media painting with the series “Reconstructions” (1991). To make these subtle compositions, he uses salvaged industrial materials such as acrylic glass, aluminum, mirrored foil, resin, silicone, and wire, decontextualizing them from their original uses and recombining them into aesthetic forms. Polanszky’s process of synthesis produces works that oscillate between material constructions and symbols of subjective perception. In his solo exhibition, the “Reconstructions” newly incorporate copper foil. Interspersed between fields of white corrugated cardboard and silvery aluminum, these gleaming, gently creased metal sheets add an entirely new tonal and textural dimension to the surface of each painting. In some compositions, Polanszky combines copper with silver or deep purplish mirrored foil, recalling the rippling, reflective surfaces of the “Bright Mirrors” and “Dark Mirrors”, two paired subseries of the “Reconstructions”  first seen in his exhibition at Gagosian New York last year. Also on view are two recent sculptures in which Polanszky makes use of the rough-hewn edges of the same repurposed objects, manipulating strips of metal and acrylic glass into curved forms and dynamic abstractions. Polanszky’s handling of material is intuitive and improvisational; he often leaves the individual components of his works outdoors, letting the natural elements help determine his constructions’ final surfaces and forms. Yet these works also reveal his acute consideration of the properties and possibilities of materials. In Polanszky’s hands, industrial fragments are transformed into shimmering arrangements that transcend their mundane origins.

Since the mid-1970s, Rudolf Polanszky has created a multifaceted oeuvre in a range of media that extends from conceptual film, video, and photography to drawing and painting, sculptural objects, and assemblages. His art is informed by the intentional and even methodical integration of the accidental. Of particular significance is the incorporation of materials that show traces of wear or exposure to the elements: they in a sense encourage the artist to abdicate control over the emergence of form and undercut his constructive-creative will. His fascination with scientific explanatory models in conjunction with his skepticism concerning an ostensibly imperturbable logic’s claim to interpret the world has prompted the artist to devise various schemes of comprehension. Guided by the idea of renouncing the making of meaning, they manifest themselves in intuitively constructed objects he sees as tentative embodiments of mental-linguistic formations.  Polanszky first broached questions of perception/cognition, fallacy, and illusion in early Super 8 films such as “On a Semiology of the Senses” (1976), and “The Musical Ape” (1979). The “Coil Spring Drawings” and “Seating Pictures” from the mid-1980s accord a salient role to the gesture of randomness and relinquishing control in both conception and realization. Defying the principle of determinacy, he has continually posited a kind of “hypothetical interim” meant to remind the beholder of the mutability of structures and the relativity of a scientific logic of truth. Hence Polanszky’s keen interest in phantasms, simulacra, and mirror images and his skeptical view of the absolute and purely rational. The title he chose for his show at the Secession (9/2-22/4/2018), “Eidola”, is the plural of the Greek eidolon, a small insubstantial image or phantom, and in a variation of the well-known phrase “What you see is what you get,” its leitmotif might be “What you get is more (other) than what you see”.  To describe the science-alike relation of his theoretical work, the artist introduced words as “transformation”, “non-linearity” and “symmetries” to the artistic world. Ideas like “ad hoc syntheses” and art as a part of the evolution illuminate Polanszky’s way of working and thinking. The consistent evolutionary progress of his artworks, from his earliest “Lard Drawings”, via “Tierstempelbilder” (structures made from animal tracks) and “Nylon Convolution” through to “Reconstructions” (1990s), peaks in the development of the object-like, three-dimensional pictorial works towards the objects, sculptures and installations such as “Hypertransformation Sculptures” or the “Hyperbolic Spaces”. In the 1990s, the methodological approaches evolved into work on transformative, structural aspects of topologies, which led to the development of “Translinear Reconstructions”. The two-dimensional concept of “surfaces” was already undermined in the “Reconstructions”, from 1995 onwards, by non-linear procedures such as layering and deep-structure transformations and led via the three-dimensional “Foldings” etc. to the concepts of “Hyperbolic Spaces” and “Hypertransformation Sculptures”.

Photo: Rudolf Polanszky, Reconstructions / Double Twin Pictures, 2020, Aluminum, resin, silicone, cardboard, transparent tape, acrylic glass, pigment, and acrylic on canvas, in artist’s frame, 83 ¼ × 102 ⅝ inches (211.4 × 260.5 cm), © Rudolf Polanszky. Photo: Jorit Aust, courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian Gallery, 4 rue de Ponthieu, Paris, Duration: 16/1-20/3/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-17:00, https://gagosian.com