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Artists working in the Surrealist mode are interested in representing a personal interior world that is essentially beyond language and traditional means of representation. Anyone who has tried to explain a vivid dream will know how it inevitably becomes a shadow of the real experience, when translated into words. Max Podstolski who is showing a group of paintings in the James Hight Library would readily admit to the difficulty of this. He looks at the network of signs we use in communication letters, numbers, symbols, words, colours and questions the effectiveness of these signs in telling us about the real world. Does one sign 'truthfully' reflect one thing in the physical world, or is the sign only an arbitrary constructed name which can but approximate to the 'real' thing? Significance and Beyond moves in layers from familiar 'signs' of birds, body, guitar, water to more abstracted signs like letters, numbers and unfamiliar symbols. The progression is from the recognisable to the abstract and formal, but all signs are on a continuum, suggesting that one is as accurate, or 'truthful' of the physical world, as the other. Familiar 'signs' for 'bird' for example, are little more truthful than the obscure marks above. The artist would be happy with this flexibility of meaning because it allows the viewer freedom for interpretation. We will be able to share some of the significances while others will remain relevant only to the artist himself. We are being asked to be creative, as well. Podstolski wants to lead us away from the familiar into what must be an approximation of his personal inner world. He sees himself as a metaphysical, mystical artist and has a surrealist belief in the importance of dreams. Sign-Post For Somnambulists is one of the more successful landscapes of his 'other' world. He uses fluid, weirdly organic shapes derived from Miro. Almost all the works are meticulously finished. Visible brushstrokes have been eliminated. Uniformly flat colour is bounded by equally uniform lines. Some of the methods of bordering shapes and banding in repeated sequences must have been inspired by Aboriginal art. These techniques must have been employed to suggest an altered state of consciousness; the contemplative calm in Homage to Jawlensky, the obsessive pattern of Traces of Identity. Sometimes Podstolski comes close to achieving the sort of resonance into unfathomable space that was Miro's triumph (As If The Twentieth Century Never Happened, Bird Dancing in the Night). But then sometimes this distinctive technique acts as a barrier to the intention of creating a convincing fantasy. When colour is consistently flat and uniform, contour perfectly regular in width and density, the 'world' of the picture becomes concrete and tangible. We are made overtly aware that forms exist close to us, within a shallow spatial field. The picture is, after a while, comprehensible, and surely it is incomprehensibility and the intangible that the artist is aiming at. Perhaps Podstolski best achieves the sort of dynamism, the shifting and elusive quality I am talking about in his more structured sequential works (Blue Fire, The Evil Eye). Here he is working in the mode which is most natural to him the precise and finely ordered. The works play on complications and repetition with variation and the viewer is drawn in by the difficulty of trying to 'read' them. They are like the other 'signs' because there is no fixed meaning and reality is always shifting. A number of works convey a sense of spontaneity (In the Labyrinth of Desire, Bird Dancing in the Night), and this is an achievement in an artist who operates within the hard-edged meticulous mode. Podstolski's success will be measured by the emotive impact his 'other' worlds have on the viewer. That this impact will be different for each person is in keeping with the ideas [at] the centre of his art.
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