Hudson, N.Y. — What a provocative artist Kenneth Polinskie is. Happy Medium, his new show at Hudson Opera House (through May 29) presents a whole gamut of pictorial possibilities. On the one hand there are relatively straightforward depictions of birds, animals and plants – in another context you might take them for simple nature studies – but there are also representations so stylized that they teeter on the edge of abstraction. It is what lies between these two extremes that makes Polinskie’s exhibit so absorbing.
Polinskie is a paper-maker of many years’ experience. He often makes the very surface that he draws and paints on. Perhaps this is why he is so very aware that any mark on that surface is as real as any other, no matter how “realistic” the image they comprise. In the excellent short essay that Polinskie has written to accompany his show, he puts it like this: “However precise the depiction … it remains nothing more than … a parody of actual existence fabricated out of mind, hand and spirit to satisfy the artist’s whim.”
What this means is perhaps best demonstrated in the two arrangements of twenty unframed paintings that he has hung edge to edge (see above). Their subject matter ranges from cartoon characters to anthropomorphized animals to landscapes to a man-eating tree. Just as diverse are the ways in which these things are rendered. Sharp linearity in one image gives way to casual brushiness in another. Careful tonal variations sit side by side with areas of flat color. In more than one picture – like Regal Dog, for example – all of these things appear together. None of the representation is entirely convincing, and everything is also something else. Or, as John Lennon expressed it, “Nothing is real.”
If there was no more than this to Polinskie’s art, it would still make for fascinating viewing, but what drags his work up out of the realm of the merely intellectual and into striking relevance is the parallel that he sees between pictorial and political dissembling. “In the wake of global attacks on free speech,” he says in his essay, “specifically political or satirical cartoons, the act of drawing again becomes fodder for the easily fooled or antagonized.” In a post-Charlie Hebdo world where careless cartooning can carry a death sentence, it is no wonder that in a number of Polinskie’s pictures an undead skeleton appears. In one of them its ragged cloak has a lining of comic-strip fragments.
If Polinskie’s art invites us to consider how one thing can mean something else, or what is and isn’t real, then a further fascinating parallel is to be found in his foisting of human characteristics on birds and animals. In a few cartoonish cases the result is pretty much benign, but far more often creatures seem inhabited by the less appealing aspects of human nature. One of the creatures in Possum It Tickles rather comically studies the sprig that it holds in its hand, but the others are about to come to blows. The big guy on the left is very much the aggressor, but the other – with an ugly fight-or-flight look on his face – is more than ready to defend his territory. Elsewhere dogs bully one another, and a rabbit makes a fox carry him on his back, like a man astride a horse.
You will find mermaids here, and space travelers and log fires and hatpins, but more importantly you will find a great deal to think about, and that is rarer than it ought to be in art shows. So let’s leave the last words to Ken Polinskie himself: “Drawings talk and tell jokes,” he writes. “They weep. They tell stories and lies. They grieve. They heal.”
