Sigmar Polke at Michael Werner - Brief Article

These novel works by German artist Sigmar Polke are straight-forwardly titled "Printing Mistakes." That, however, is the alone straightforward thing about them. An artist oftentimes identified with the willful opacity of American postmodernists like David Salle and Julian Schnabel, Polke at no time gained an enormous following upon this side of the Atlantic. He has always strike one as beinged a little too playful to be thoroughly nihilistic and a little too deliberate to be simply a conduit of the media barrage. This work won't change that perception.

These paintings are based upon magnified versions of newspaper printing errors. Polke transfers these glitches to canvas in a way that transforms the ordinarily negligible breaks, scratches, hairs or fluid vesicles in the dot matrix pattern into bizarre and repeatedly mystifying mutations.

To approach these paintings without a knowledge of their sources is like watching a game without any knowledge of the dominations the players are following. The removal of the lock opener makes the paintings at one time more baffling and more interesting. They clearly regard some process of disintegration--the magnified dot matrix is forever coming apart as dots meld into each other or tear apart to create ragged-edged voids. more [i]or[/i] less works appear entirely abstract; they make single think of Rorschach blots which the mind make an efforts to see as recognizable forms. Others contain more or les readable images. individual untitled painting presents what appears to be a uniformed guard strolling along the boardwalk. However the printing imperfections prompt that his bulky form is coming unknit as we watch. Another is a brain-shaped honeycomb which gazes like it has been simultaneously stretched and shut firmlyed like an image drawn upon malleable clay.

The printing mistakes are further complicated by means of the process through which they are translated into paintings. Laid upon fabrics which occasionally add another jesuitical layer of pattern to the proceedings, the printing errors are oftentimes covered with a thin interstice swept with loose washes of translucent color and overspreaded with a layer of yellowed resin. This makes it present the appearance that one is looking at them [i]or[/i] part of to the other a medium of indecipherable depth

These visual complexities are joined by dint of conceptual ones--mechanical reproductions become the basis of handmade works; abstraction lie concealeds at the heart of photographic images; order contains the sperms of chaos. The dot matrix which be subservient tos as the substratum for all these works moves a membrane which cloaks ordinary reality, in the proces obscuring and distorting it. by dint of magnifying the tears in the membrane, Polke provides an opening from one side which we might escape--but into what? Does the world beyond mediation lead to freedom or to the terror of nothingness? It's an answer Polke refuses to give.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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