Rogelio Polesello

News of Rogelio Polesello's passing caught us all by surprise, young still, joyful by nature, Polesello's work—inquisitive and persistent—amplified always his profound joie de vivre. Polesello graduated in 1958 as a printmaking, drawing and illustration educator. A precocious artist, he had his first show in 1959 (Peuser gallery), and shortly thereafter his work was already on display at the Pan American Union in Washington, D.C., jumpstarting an international career that was to continue in Caracas, Bogotá, Mexico, the Center for International Relations in New York City, Tokyo, Barcelona, Germany, Switzerland, England, the former Yugoslavia, and a large number of other locations that became landmarks of an indefatigable activity unfolding in an—always dazzling—oeuvre that included paintings of paper and canvas as well as fascinating works on carved acrylic. In an almost natural way, Polesello won awards that connected art and industry, such as Salón Hisisa de arte aplicado a la industria textil (1967) or Objetos útiles e inútiles con acrílicos Paolini (1970 and 1974), and one of the two Diez Jóvenes Sobresalientes of 1973, Pintura Mural for Aerolíneas Argentinas at the Jorge Newbery Aeropark (Buenos Aires, 1981), or his 2.50 x 30 meters work for the Ezeiza airport (2000). "I need to construct a painting", he said, and this is the unique sense of order that lied under his art, with a play of asymmetrical balances, contrasts of defined forms with fuzzy colors, luminous lines with dark regions, or the use of grids achieves with air guns. Until 1970 he was also an extraordinary graphic artist. It would seem that after that date, the appearance of his carved acrylic planks projected his imagination towards three-dimensional objects, colored or otherwise, supported or hanging from the ceiling, serial or stand-alone, in a hallucinatory display of transparency effects or multiplied images that altered or disfigured familiar environments. Light is the great protagonist of these sculptures, as it is the case in Polesello's paintings. Sharing preeminence with it are his use of circles, hexagons, and prisms, as well as his celebration of color, transparency, and iridescence. Aldo Pellegrini has written: "Confronted with such an exceptionally endowed painter, one thinks of the precocity of those privileged individuals born with the secret of the world's visual magic. Their paintbrushes acquire the virtues of a necromancer's wand, and their incantations submerge us in an spectacle of enchantment". "Pole" knew how to do this. With his prodigious legacy, he has submerged us in successive spectacles of visual enchantment.