The Peculiarity of the Joy Reference

- on Rudolf Polanszky

Conceptual text by Herbert Lachmayer

With the ease of directness, Rudolf Polanszky’s work presents itself as a “golden thread“ with peculiarities. By no means is it necessary to show its contextual derivation, as it practically stands for itself. His aesthetic peculiarity does not borrow its vocabulary from contemporary attitudes; however, when considered from within its context, Polanszky’s work tends toward unpretentiousness.

The ambiguity of his playful references may derive from, among other things, the way in which his work hermetically projects what it taps into, remaining at the same time a fragment of the whole. In assuming a transparent approach, the artist plays with bending to the same extent as he does with the gestural pathos of porousness. In a pose of fragility that could be compared with Giacometti, in terms of the constructive medium of a redundant rhythm and the profane epiphany of a temporal-spatial stretch into mirroring symbols and parables, he opens up with humor and irony an always unexpected, novel aspect of formal intervention in a language of form that, to borrow from Adorno, “unravels into itself” (in “The Unraveling of the Arts,” Adorno compares the two-dimensionality of painting with the three-dimensionality of music) and which refers always in new ways to changes of perspective, to surprise. Polansky does not have to pull back, ever more strongly, from semantic fields of meaning; he is satisfied with a kind of exact, and exalted allusion, which holds in its structure the spectrum of multiple interpretations. Precisely this independence of his objects inspires with a sheer myriad of possible rhetorical-associative parameters, word plays in divergent genres, and a sifting through fields of meaning that have grown obsolete.

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