Stephen Polatch: The Beloved Color. The Hateful Color.

Stephen Polatch
The Beloved Color. The Hateful Color.

Margot Samel
295 Church St
New York, NY 10013

November 22, 2024 - January 04, 2025
Preview, November 22, 6-8pm

The title of the artist’s second solo exhibition with Margot Samel derives from a song cycle of Franz Schubert’s from 1823, based on 20 poems by Wilhelm Müller, Die schöne Müllerin. In these poems a young traveler pines for a miller’s daughter who favors a suitor dressed in green. An obsession with this color is born from his heartbreak and he is left to anguish in the countryside seeing his loss in the green hills he once loved.

Made over the course of the past two years, both in the studio and en plein air, Stephen Polatch’s works playfully grow from the poetic drama.

His subjects merge with nature, wander through rivers, court each other among green ribbons of trees and lakes, reflect over sunsets, and enjoy times where both very much and nothing at all happens.

The bodies of water threaded throughout the exhibition are made from dappling brushstrokes that mimic the classical piano of this title score and a gentle tension between inside and outside spaces echo the artist’s own mediation between the focus of the studio and the pull of the outside world.

In a figurative series of works Polatch imagines his subjects musing in and out of moments of rest, idly engaging with the world as it passes through them. Depicting exchanges between humanity and nature is a common theme among both the works presented and his greater practice. As streams of water swirl between couples, night skies engulf them overhead. There is a purposeful and strange ambiguity to this effect.

Polatch often begins his paintings as repetitive drawings of motifs he is attracted to from his studio. Letting the forms determine their meaning, separating themselves from their primary signifiers, aligns his practice with systematic and automatic processes used by early twentieth-century Surrealists. His grasp on pattern and decoration however softens the former movement’s harder refusal of the dominant world.