Acts of Looking
(excerpt)
There is a deep history of the camaraderie and tension between photography and painting. Joseph Podlesnik is a love child of both arts, and there is a reason so many painters admire his work. He continually captures moments in nature that could provide the framework for understanding modernist painting. The work is steeped in visual phenomena that reveal a love and knowledge of art and how it informs the way we perceive this world. Podlesnik delights in the formal language of composition through improvising on alignment, proximity, texture, scale, movement and variation. The way he navigates a scene is intensely structural, yet intuitive. His is a mind of dialectic, and the retinal threads he weaves are a form of counterpoint. Podlesnik dances with light feet and wit through the formal foundations of perception, but gravity and psychology is always present.
In Podlesnik’s cover image, we see a shadow of himself projected on planes of depth and flatness, equally dividing the picture plane. On the left, the sidewalk suggests his role as wanderer and observer, venturing into the world in search of a subject. On the right, he coerces the representation of the world, and our view of it, into a flat and ordered abstraction. Just as the Maid of Corinth is said to give birth to painting by tracing the shadow of her lover on a wall, Podlesnik may here be tracing his own origins back to painting and his love of the tenuous relationship between two-dimensional design and the three-dimensional world.
-- Nathan Lewis
Associate Professor, Sacred Heart University