Andrew Topolski: Overground I, 1994

Since the early eighties, Topolski’s art has been concerned with politics and the environment, specifically with the development of nuclear energy and its military implications. His sculptural installations and drawings take up technological disaster in abstract terms, full of real and apparent allusions to science, with “forms relating to nuclear weapons and energy—missile silos, containment domes, cooling towers and the like.”¹

In Overground I, a large horizontal work, Topolski creates a highly illusionistic cluster of interlocking rings—perhaps the bases of missiles—through an extremely precise use of pigment and graphic contour. He captures the metallic sheen of the unidentified objects in varying shades of silver and copper. Amid the seemingly reflective surfaces of these objects, an area of rich brown pigment suggests a dark space.

Although the illusionistic element occupies only about a quarter of the composition, it is by far the most striking section. The remainder is extremely spare, with little or no use of color, and no shadowing to suggest depth or volume. The ground is smudged with pigment and bears traces of the artist’s fingerprints.

In the bottom half of the ground is a schematic drawing in graphite of an unspecified machine or implement, shaped somewhat like tongs. At the left, clamp, end is a circular form around which two intersecting rings appear to orbit. Two sets of parallel lines emerge, handle-like, toward the right, crossing before they traverse the horizontal field. At the right end are two dark segments and curves that suggest a horseshoe magnet. Various collage elements, including black transfer numbers and letters, have been applied at either end of the implement.

Among the most explicit elements in the drawing are the small sections of repeated text on the right. The text includes the words “resistance” and “revolution,” presumably for their meanings in both physics and politics.