Sigmar Polke. Affinities Revealed

Curiosity lea d Polke to explore, by means of x-radiography what he sensed lay beneath the scene of The Old Women; this provided him with a wealth of themes which he would later address in his work. He was particularly struck by certain fragments of the canvas, which he photographed and then enlarged in photocopies that he altered by drawing over them. 

In the upper left part of the X-radiograph of The Old Women, we can quite clearly make out an earlier composition, a Resurrection of Christ surrounded by small fluffy clouds, within which faces or departed souls can be glimpsed. Polke found this composition especially appealing, as it chimed with his interest in the magical and the paranormal, and with his view of works of art more as phenomenological events than as closed, complete realities. 

Polke's iconographic exploration of the painting extended to the tiniest details, such as the jewellery adorning the lady in white, and especially the arrow so curiously lodged in her curls, as well as her disproportionately large earrings. Equally important are the wigs that conceal the ladies' baldness, which triggered Polke's later interest in headgear of all kinds. He also paid clase attention to the chair, and to the inquisitive mirror held up by the lady-in-waiting. 

Shades of Saturn (in his twin roles as mythological being and planet) - ruler of chance, time, feasting, criticism and the reversal of roles and attributes, lord of the daimons and guarantor of the utopian Golden Age- hover over Polke's vast exercise in the exploration of form and material, just as they dominate the scene in Goya's painting of the two old women. 

Goya's signature, enlarged in the photocopies, assumes particular importance, in that it reflects the incorporation of the artist's presence into the flow of creative formalisation, prompting a fertile collusion between chance or deliberate interactions and a formal association that inverts causes and effects. 

The late 1960s, when Polke was starting out on his career, were a time of cultural and political change. The determinist arguments espoused by the modernism whose birth had been witnessed by Goya were now being called into question. In both cases, an ancien régime had been overturned, but while the earlier cultural disruption had favoured an attempt to build a new, stable arder, the collapse that took place in the late 20th century called for more complex solutions, which had to include the concept of disequilibrium in all cultural spheres. 

Polke's creative drive springs from the search for communion with natural processes, from accident and error. When he provoques the flow of pigments concocted through daring chemistry, he is not describing; rather, he is immersed in the process, prompting concrete physical events. What matters here, though, is not the scientific underpinning, but the poetic substrate, which extends even to the artist's shaping outlook on the world with which he interferes while observing it. In that respect, Goya may well have sensed, in the early 19th century, that the Enlightenment would end up recreating an alienated world, far removed from experience, and for that reason he dispensed - somewhat urgently – with the idea of verisimilitude and instead enthusiastically embraced the uncertainty of the ambiguous and the changeable.