Galerie Mezzanin is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Austrian artist Rudolf Polanszky on view from September 16 to November 26 2022.
For this exhibition the artist will be showing his recent body of works from his noted series “Reconstructions and Translinear Transformations”.

BEHOLDING THE FREE MOMENT

“We must accept the fact that space and time are not separate categories – absolutes in opposition to one another – as was earlier believed and taken for granted, but rather that they are related dimensions in the sense of the non-Euclidean conception. By intuiting this fact, or by making it our own through conscious means, all the old borders and barriers of the arts suddenly disappear.”
- CHARLES SIRATO, DIMENSIONIST MANIFESTO, 1936 *

The difference between the philosophical and intuitive approaches to understanding forms, space, and materiality has been a long standing part of Polanszky’s artistic quest; as has challenging viewer perspectives of the object as it is. Accidently discovered mutable entities and geometrically decomposed shapes provide a slight resistance to visual dissection, and furthermore, may be manipulated, sliced, or displaced to achieve the desired aesthetic effect. This singular aesthetic reflects a deeper understanding of the laws of nature, and if art is about energy, nature is about entropy. Entropy in art is an organized disorder that exists neither as a phenomenon nor non-phenomenon, but rather, as a force or a relationship of forces within a given realm or context, rendering a renegotiation of the limitations of negative space as a reflection on building materials which embodies and recalls the natural process of producing aesthetic qualities. The formal elements in his “Reconstructions” are not the summit of the hierarchical systems of intentions, but rather the confluence of a number of different strategies.

Accidental order or calculated disorder are omnipresent enigmas in Polanszky’s work. There is at first sight the obvious simplicity of the structure as a misleading exercise for the viewer. But the beauty of the “Reconstructions” lays in its complexity, which has been governed by the concept of chance, and the constant freedom of the result. It is a creative union as well as a metaphysical statement, and does not present any difficulties to sensing the unusual beauty of its abstract forms or experiencing the depth of its perplexing range of materials. However it could cast doubt on certain concepts we traditionally take to be basic and unproblematic, like rationality, utility, and expectation.

We can imagine “Reconstructions and Transilinear Transformations” as a meditation on live matter that exists not only as a real palpable universe, but also as a lens that is constantly changing focus, narrative, and reflection in both the artist’s and viewer’s perspectives. Polanszky’s artistic genius is evident in the way he uses methodical inconsistency as a creative space of absolute freedom that he then generates in terms of the principles of chance, engaging in a process that produces complex elements from simpler ones, and provides a continuously novel creative journey.

He states, “What is free in a work of art is only a moment in which is not yet comprehended.” In these moments of freedom in which the artist flirts with “knowledge”, it is not the “knowledge” of philosophy, which is always a reflective knowing, a knowing which has been subject to critique and questioning since the very inception of Western philosophy in Plato’s dialogues. Nor does it refer to scientific-technical knowledge, which is often called “learning”, to distinguish it from the knowledge of philosophy and from ordinary common knowledge. Rather, it is the intuitive ability that marries both sides of philosophy and science, and that allows expanded consciousness, a space where the creative process reaches its pure state between dimensions, and shapes itself by a transitional trajectory towards complete artistic freedom, where “chance” itself, as the artist states promisingly, generates the “free” moment.

Lara Pan

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*Charles Sirato was a Hungarian poet, art theorist, and translator. He most famously authored the Dimensionist manifesto.

Lara Pan is an independent curator,writer and researcher based in New York.