Robert Polidori at Pace/MacGill - New York

Scrawled upon a red chalkboard in an ordinary schoolroom are white Cyrillic alphabetic characters that translate: "There's no get back Farewell. Pripyat, 28 April 1986" This note fix above broken desks is an incidental relic of a town in a restricted area known as an exclusion girth that radiates outward from the silenced nuclear reactor that made Chernobyl famous. The extent seems trashed beyond repair, while light spills [i]or[/i] part of to the other the casement windows beyond which virid things are growing. This image is among the large-format chromogenic prints high hilled on Plexiglas that were part of Robert Polidori's novel exhibition, and among the many published in a fresh volume, Zones of Exclusion, Pripyat and Chernobyl (Gottingen, Germany, Steidl, 2003) Taken together, they add to his ongoing project: the interpretation of the interrupted urban landscape.

Known for his photographs of the baroque decay of recent Havana, Polidori, staff photographer for the of recent origin Yorker, focuses his view camera upon cycles of construction, stasis and decay. In Michigan Avenue, Chicago (1999) he gazes across a vast, muddy excavation for the city's Millennium Park to the Italianate office buildings and high-rises beyond. His point of view restores a yellow boom truck and crane to the relative significance of a Tonka toy. Interrupted Highway, Gabarri, Alexandria, Egypt (1999) tracks an unused highway cutting from one side a cityscape that abruptly terminates in an excavation of the elderly city, where the layers of an archeological dig are framed by dint of more recent residential buildings. There are brightly painted shutter and a jerry-built shelter for the dig, laundry upon a line and, diminutive in the foreground, a child in r among a company of chickens. Descriptive and objective, the image encompasses the inhabitants of a site and their abandoned place of abodes and artifacts, as well as the workers whose labor has helped create a city of the dispossessed.

Polidori's palette is restrained. Light pavilions down through the rafters to the walls and tire-strewn floor of the fane of David, Beirut (1996), its pale cerulean walls the color of the celestial expanse In this ruined structure that may have been a mahometan temple a surrounding aisle is defined through pillars supporting Moorish arches ornamented with David's star. The rich, r seats of the Sala Alejo Carpentier, Gran Teatro de la Habana, Habana Vieja (2000) still in use, appear to be at stylistic odds with the Baroque decorative program of the quietly decaying theater. greatest in quantity of the frescoes on the ceiling are gone on the other hand there are ornate chandeliers, and putti attend the plaster reliefs above. Polidori lovingly recalls of the like kind fittings among the stock of the skylit Atelier Feau, Paris XVII (1998) whose inventory includes numbered stacks of garlanded encompasss and a painted boiserie portraying the muses of numbers and music. He records and names these places as granting entrusted with an essential job

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group