Francesco Polenghi: Ocean of Peace
Upper Gallery
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“Polenghi makes his marks like breathing. There is no figure, no ground in these paintings—just this incessant bustle of matter set in motion by an invisible breath.”
Barry Schwabsky
Francesco Polenghi (1936 - 2020) was an Italian painter based in Milan. Polenghi developed his early painting style in the 1960s while working in advertising and studying philosophy, in particular Baruch Spinoza. He then spent much of the 1980s in India, where he lived in an ashram and continued to study philosophy and religion.
When he moved back to Italy in 1988, Polenghi focused more intently on painting, creating an extensive body work that synthesized his studies into philosophy and his experiences across Italy, the United States, and India.
Working in a type of meditative trance, Polenghi repeatedly traced a network of lines and forms across the canvas while chanting the Gayatri mantra.
“Every painting of Polenghi’s in fact obeys the Shakespearean precept ‘to thine own self be true"... Thus Polenghi works in a state of trance, transcribing the uncensored dictation of his unconscious.”
Arturo Schwarz
“In the studio Polenghi gets lost in his art, like a storyteller or a reader who becomes totally absorbed in the flow of energy to which he formally gives shape in his painting. When working, he is totally drawn into the creative activity, oblivious to everything outside of his painting.”
David Carrier
Artforum Review: Barry Schwabsky on Francesco Polenghi
"The results were hypnotic, above all in the larger paintings, where the pulsating vitality common to all the works took on a greater sense of gravity and grandeur. In a strange way, these paintings squared the circle by combining the meditative calm of Agnes Martin’s work with the vibratory molecular excitation of Op art."
Barry Schwabsky