Robert Polidoro

While the canvases in Robert Polidoro’s Oh the Places You’ll Go can stand on their own as both humorous and beautifully made pictures, it is the weight of the historical drama evoked by canvases like The Fall of Rome that drive Polidoro’s artistic production. Many of the color palettes and compositions of these paintings are actually artistic quotations. While a grasp of Polidoro’s sources and inspirations is not needed to appreciate or understand the work by any means, an awareness of Polidoro's subjects of interest shifts the work subtly. It allows these pieces to function politically and, for me, provoke something akin to the type of self-scrutiny present in a work of art like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist.

The canvases in Robert Polidoro’s exhibition synthesize a broad range of artistic and political interests. For instance, Lysistrata Defending the Acropolis directly lifts a composition by Aubrey Beardsley, pressing it through the stylistic lens of Salvo, or maybe Spongebob. Beardsley’s critique of hypocritical patriarchal structures is updated through Polidoro’s reinterpretation: by using a visual language that traces motifs from contemporary pop commodities back through Italian-fascist futurists the artist expands Beardsley’s critique into an expanded field of political thought. Polidoro seems chiefly interested in the way that masculinity remained largely unscrutinized historically, causing similar cultural problems to rear their head time and time again.

The leaking pipes to nowhere featured prominently in most of this body of work are simultaneously stand-ins for a defeated or a deflating male ego, and depictions of the spoiling of natural beauty by industrialization. Polidoro is unwilling to represent these topics plainly. The imagery and form of abstraction Polidoro pursues seems to call upon the unrealized (or failed) utopic principles of most historic movements which pursued geometric abstraction in art. The project of simplification of form pushes the canvases towards an inherently political and satirical position.

There are no easy answers in Polidoro’s Oh the Places You’ll Go, but these deceivingly simple images are just as worth approaching politically as they are appealing to look at.

—Gabriel Cohen