Michael Polakowski’s “Fire On The Mountain”
M Contemporary Art
205 E. Nine Mile Rd.
Ferndale
Saturday, Aug. 8
If you ever wondered what famous 16th century Dutch and Flemish paintings looked like filtered through the promo artwork of Sega Genesis-era “Sonic the Hedgehog,” painter Michael Polakowski is the artist for you.
In his latest exhibition — “Fire On The Mountain,” on view through Sept. 5 at the M Contemporary Art gallery in Ferndale — Polakowski’s playfulness and rich depth of landscape is on full view in perhaps his most colorful and whimsical body of work yet, wrapped in handmade wood frames that he’s fashioned himself from basswood.
You can see the influence of Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch in his work — influences Polakowski openly admits to loving — in the depth of landscape, and in the close-up perspective of a villager overlooking a small town and beyond, perhaps gearing up for a great journey.
Pieces like “Some on Their Way and Others Returning” (framed as if you were looking out a castle window) and the diptych “Water the Mountain (What Good it Will Do)” hammer those influences home.
In Polakowski’s “Fire on the Mountain,” however, the colors are radical and the journey a vaguely existential one that ponders the environment in our heavy, pressing times. These aren’t just far away stories from the 16th century; these are environmental crises at the doorstep of today.
In both paintings “Leap of Faith” and “Too Far from the Ground; Too Close to the Sun,” Polakowski paints two objects you wouldn’t expect to see in nature — an antique vase spilling water and a piece of fabric snagged on a branch but flowing freely in the wind — in a vivid buttery yellow that gives them a hefty juxtaposition among gem-like cliffsides. It makes the patron wonder what objects will survive as time passes on and the landscape changes, perhaps returning to a more feral state as cities fade away.
The symbolism is easily as rich in a series of smaller paintings described as “offering cards,” which plays into the fantasy feel that permeates throughout the show. At least one patron referred to them as “tarot cards” and that’s apt description. In Polakowski’s mind, perhaps our fate has already been decided by the cards we’ve been dealt in the same way that climate scientists argue that it’s too late for regulation to stop global warming.
As much tension and dread that Polakowski pours into this latest body of work, it is a vivid, fun show to take in (if you’re not so focused on the points he’s trying to make). There’s an excellent sense of movement from the paintings themselves but also from their handmade wooden frames, which Polakowski taught himself to make over the past year. And when it comes to style, there’s simply no one in Detroit doing it like Polakowski.
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