Rogelio Polesello

Rogelio Polesello began working at an advertising agency at fifteen and qualified as a Fine Arts teacher at nineteen. By then, he had already found the obsession that would accompany him for half a century: discovering what happens when light passes through a surface and distorts what lies behind it. That curiosity took him from canvas to carved acrylic, from paintings to public space, and made him one of Latin America’s leading figures in optical art. His works are held by the MoMA, the Guggenheim and museums in several countries. More than a decade after his death, exhibitions devoted to his work continue to attract large audiences.

A Boy in a Hurry

Polesello was born in Buenos Aires in 1939. By fifteen, he was already working at an advertising agency, a fact that explains much of his later work: he never saw a clear boundary between art and design, or between painting and industry.

He studied at the Manuel Belgrano National School of Fine Arts and graduated in 1958 from the Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts as a teacher of Engraving, Drawing and Painting. During those years, he discovered the work of Paul Klee, which had a decisive influence on him. Another influence came from home: his father was a building contractor, and from him Polesello inherited the habit of incorporating unusual materials into his work.

That same year, 1958, he exhibited for the first time alongside his friend Luis Wells at Galatea Gallery. A year later came his first solo exhibition at Peuser Gallery, where his admiration for Victor Vasarely, the father of op art, was already evident.

Painting That Moves Without Moving

His underlying question was always the same: how to create movement in something static. To achieve it, he worked with oscillations between figure and ground, displaced geometric forms that generate a sense of instability, and a bold use of color.

Curator Mercedes Casanegra noted that Polesello entered Argentine geometric and optical abstraction in an autonomous and original way, freely expanding those categories through combinations of order and randomness that distinguished his entire body of work.

The result is art that acts as a trap for the eye. Images multiply what they reflect, like kaleidoscopes, forcing viewers to move in order to fully see them.

The Material That Changed His Life

The decisive discovery came in 1966, when Acrílicos Lubas invited artists to participate in the exhibition Plástica por Plásticos. There, Polesello encountered polymethyl methacrylate — acrylic — and never abandoned it.

Using the material, he carved pieces capable of breaking apart and distorting whatever image lay behind them. Painting left the wall and began invading space, transforming the way art was viewed not only in his own work but across the Argentine art scene of the period.

Behind that leap was obsessive work. Polesello produced enormous numbers of sketches on paper, with exhaustive studies of perspective, structures, forms and colors, recombined again and again. His method was always one of trial and error.

From the Museum to a Racing Car

Few Argentine artists crossed as many disciplines. Polesello worked in painting, engraving, sculpture, murals and objects, but also in advertising design, architecture, environmental design and even body painting. His vision moved through decoration, fashion and cinema without asking permission.

Two commissions show the breadth of that approach. In 1988, racing driver Guillermo Maldonado asked him to decorate his Volkswagen 1500 for competition in Turismo Competición 2000. Between 2001 and 2002, he created Eclipse, a work for Ezeiza International Airport. In 2010, his monument to the heroes of the Battle of Vuelta de Obligado was inaugurated at the site of the battle itself.

A Life of Awards

His list of distinctions mirrors his career. He won first prize at the Esso Salon of Latin American Artists in 1965, the Georges Braque Prize in 1968, the Grand Honor Prize of the National Salon in 1988, the Grand Honor Prize of the National Arts Fund in 2003 and the Trabucco Prize from the National Academy of Fine Arts in 2006. He also received two Konex Awards, in 1982 for objects and in 2012 for painting.

He exhibited at the Pan American Union in Washington, the Paris Biennale, the São Paulo Biennial, the Instituto Di Tella and museums in Caracas, Bogotá, Mexico and New York. His work is held in the collections of MoMA, the Guggenheim, Malba and Argentina’s National Museum of Fine Arts, among many others.

In his final period, he moved in the opposite direction from his most colorful years: he emptied the picture plane, moved closer to minimalism and increasingly used black and white.

What Remained

Polesello died on July 6, 2014, twenty days before his 75th birthday. His work did not stand still.

In 2015, Malba presented Polesello joven 1958-1974, a retrospective of 120 works curated by Mercedes Casanegra and accompanied by a 400-page catalogue. In July 2025, the Centro Cultural Borges opened Más aquí. Polesello 1970-2000, featuring more than 150 works from three key decades. Curated by Santiago Villanueva, the exhibition combined pieces from the collection of Naná Gallardo, his partner for twenty years, with material from the artist’s archive and works from private collections. The catalogue was presented in November of that year.

Villanueva described him as a conceptual neo-Baroque artist, someone who came from tradition and mixed it with everything. Gallardo, who preserves much of his legacy, puts it more simply: for her, he is the master, the only one.

Looking Differently

The title of the Borges exhibition came from a concept developed by critic Marta Traba: an art that does not limit itself to being contemplated, but seeks a viewer who also produces something.

That is perhaps the best definition of what Polesello pursued for fifty years. He did not want his work to be observed silently; he wanted it to make the viewer’s eye work. Every carved acrylic piece is an invitation to move, change perspective and discover that what was visible a second ago is no longer there. That game, which began in an advertising agency when he was a teenager, occupied his entire life.