The subtlety outlined human figure is seen between color and abstraction. It plays to share the spotlight on an artwork’s depicted stage. Within its elaboration, it suggests the instance where fiction flirts about, without the intention of prevailing or competing with the human body, thus creating a visual balance. Through this, the work surfaces to life where Robert Pokorny has opened up a space to whoever paying attention.
“What you see is a hybridization of figurative and abstraction”
By Natalia Vidal Toutin. Journalist (Chile)
Images courtesy of the artist.
“I consciously or unconsciously break down environments and turn them into formal elements,” in this way the American, Robert Pokorny, describes the precedents of a time sensitive and unresolved work. The colors, waves and geometry duel it out in a work that promotes the fluctuations of the emotions and psyche that originate from a story that has no other ending than that which the viewer creates in their mind. Immersing the figurative into relativity produces sensitive bridges where what is preconceived is exposed to the impartiality of the conscious and discretion of the interpretation. This dependence creates a broad interpretative space against what the surrounding eyes didn’t leave unaffected. Describing this interaction with the work results in a second genesis that leaves it in limbo and removes it from reality and keeps it convinced.
Intuition delegates to the form by directing a measured balance between the figurative and the abstract, to develop an argument that in the decontextualization of the classic and formal, provokes an outpouring of effusiveness, color and diffusion of contours. “There is an internal dialogue where the story, body and shape are combined,” explains the artist referring to the effect that produces intensity and fluidity. Everything is brought together around the search for meaning and a deepening of the subject which within the materialization of its parts and fragments, its composition, construction and deconstruction, express the relativity, complexity and infinity of the motives to drive this search.
Like when reviving what is reflected in an emotion living within the idea, the grouping of parts of a body that still maintain their form through geometric links, tell a story that seems true to the depiction of a feeling. What art blurs is condensed and compacted in the interpretation from the viewer who discovers, through Robert Pokorny’s technique, the world of feelings and thoughts brought to the observer’s contemplation and to reality. In practice, the colors show the stridency and saturation of the idea and they stand out or disappear in the intersections by becoming or not becoming protagonists, and they obtain a word.
Tom Clancy, writer and fellow compatriot of the artist, once said that the difference between reality and fiction was that fiction makes more sense. Indeed, the conceptual density and that intent to overflow the entire panoramic of his work towards an outpouring of feelings and stimulations make what is typical to the practice and the empirical, magically complement one another and form an image that includes, within its creation, the affections previously created and expressed by Pokorny, in order to make them converse with the viewer. “It is a psychological search for meaning, an intense presentation of my vision of reality. What you see is a hybridization of figurative and abstraction. I enjoy finding the balance between the two,” he explains while bringing an aspect to the table that seems to harmoniously bring together the very psychological and emotional attributes of the human being with the nature of existence in a connected and balanced way, by making art about the message and the canvas.
The painting seems not to have a place in the memory or any evocation until man appears. A fragment of the human figure that seems to arrange the path of sight is repeated and echoes. Later, it is lost or blurred, between geometric shapes, in order to appear in color-blind lumps or lines that seem to give it warmth, embrace it and hide it.
Unconnected with the aesthetic superficiality and that which due to being immersed in globalization merges into a dizzying influx of meaningless, superimposed and stimulated images, Robert Pokorny breaks down the human body and returns it as a series of constructed pieces on the basis of the immersion of the being in an infinite number of problems and characteristics that determine, define and influence him. Therefore, the individual, which is understood as a sociable and necessarily formed being, is transformed before the viewer’s eyes in a storyline described in intuitions and random and spontaneous actions. “While painting, my goal was to achieve a certain level of disappearing that would allow the action and the painting to dictate what could be developed,” says the artist.
The strokes, lines and marks in his work remain at the disposal of his cognitive process, from the phenomena that happens within him when he starts to question existence and its immensity. “In each mark of intuition that I leave, confidence is key,” he confesses, while leaving a glimpse of that secret where he states that no element or component of his work is a result of mistake or hesitation.
There, where everything originates and is blended together, the image arises. It is a body and an abstraction that denounces a state whose nature is exempt from an absolute and unquestionable interpretation. “The tug-of-war between the lines that I make is a reaction, thus I go along drawing a precarious line that succeeds or fails,” he explains while insinuating that there is no going back to the beginning of a work in process.
It is essential to think about those words that we inherited from Victor Hugo: “the human body is a mere appearance, and it hides our reality,” since Robert’s work has a lot of this in its outward appearance and termination. Each form and space constructs a bilateral illusion that questions the essence. Within those, there is a sensorial perception that appears to the conscience and challenges that present which, for many authors from all eras, is an invisible and empirically nonexistent point, a sum conscious of memories and illusions. “I am exhibiting ideas that reveal a deeper sensibility and the curiosity inherent to the quest for meaning,” concludes the painter.
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