Arco iris (Rainbow)

Polesello drew liberally from his background in graphic and commercial design in his early abstractions, adapting printing techniques—airbrushing, color transfer—to enhance the optical effects of light and color. Among Argentina’s leading exponents of Op art and geometric abstraction in the 1960s, he explored perceptual questions of transparency, multiplication, and movement across a range of work on paper and, later, acrylic surfaces. His method of building and patterning color is intrinsic to the screenprinting process, in which each pigment is applied separately, creating a multi-layered surface of variable chromatic densities and saturations. In "Arco iris", Polesello channels the prismatic brilliance of the rainbow, overlaying colors—cool blues, warm reds and yellows—in dizzying geometric patterns to create a shimmering, kaleidoscopic effect. Here foregrounded in the materiality of the print medium, the visual analysis of light and optical illusion lay at the core of his decades-long multimedia practice, which probed the expressive properties of color and the nature of vision itself.

This text was created in collaboration with the University of Maryland Department of Art History & Archaeology and written by Patricia Ortega-Miranda.