Polien Boons’ works have a continuous tendency to analyse and deconstruct the spatial realities we inhabit, both as individuals and collectively. This way of perceiving the world, spatially rather than temporally, started for the artist when she came across Georges Perec’s Species of spaces and other pieces (1974), anyway: towns, for example, or the country- side, or the corridors of the Paris Metro, or a public park. Stated by Perec in his foreword, this quote bears a crucial feature inherent in the work of Polien - namely the fascination for the entitled superiority and control that humankind exerts over space: both conceptually (naming of galaxy systems, planets, continents, nations) as well as physically (creation of towns, streets, cities). She evokes a heightened awareness of humans’ necessity to categorize in order to acknowledge existence to other entities, which lies at the foreground of a dichotomy between culture and nature that Polien seeks to unravel in her work.

She is inspired by the works of Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alÿs and Mark Manders, who equally inscribe themselves in the romantic tradition, and whose practices share a similar poetic sensibility originating from a profound admiration for the notion of the Sublime. Poliens work aspires to enchant the spectator, by subtly mesmerizing the gaze and igniting visual wanderings into one’s own imagination and wonderment.

This dichotomy between the urge for encompassing structure and rationalisation of matter, and its continuous fallacy, was previously embedded in Polien’s practice predominantly as subject matter. Over the past years, she has moved from working with gridded paper, glass and metal, towards a practice that embodies both organic and industrial materials, which can be seen as an activation, an assimilation almost, of this conceptual approach within the creative process itself.

This experimentation brought her to discovering the hypnotising e ects of goniochromism - which manifests itself organically in the shells of jewel beetles, opal, butter y wings, petrol and clouds. This iridescence, made up by microstructures within certain matter that interferes with light, evoking surfaces that gradually appear to change colour depending on the viewing angle, is now embedded within Polien’s visual signature. Her fascination for this phenomenon has brought her in which the author objectively deploys a persevering objectivity to describe in a literal mode his surroundings. These enumerations, measurements, categorizations and descriptions of spaces read as anecdotes dissected into seemingly arbitrary lists, facts and gures. To juxtapose its natural appearances with man-made imitated surfaces such as iridescent foil.

Taking the desire to imitate, appropriate and even surpass nature’s secrets even a step further, the artist is currently conducting a long-term research into the possibilities of creating iridescent paint.

Polien re-enacts this objectivation as a methodology in her visual compositions, consistently consisting of grids or demarcated surfaces that function as structuring devices for whatever content she overlays them with. This mostly ends expression in the continuous assem- bling of collages, for which she creates heaps of undeniable abstract forms and cut-outs, triggering a typical human reaction - namely that of structuring, organizing, arranging and attributing significance. With the grid as a backdrop, she is guided by unconsciously constructed rules and arbitrary form- and colour- categorisations to reconstruct the deconstructed environment.

These collages exist both autonomously within her practice, and as mind maps for the creation of three- dimensional installations.

Space. Not so much those in nite spaces, whose mutism is so prolonged that it ends by triggering o something akin to fear, nor the already almost domesticated interplanetary, intersidereal or intergalactic spaces, but spaces that are much closer to hand, in principle.

In her last year at STRT Kit, Polien has experimented with copper as both a medium and a carrier for her artistic processes. A new series of collages originated from etching on a copper plate, incorporating the technique of Chine-Collé in which an extra layer of coloured paper (in this case multiple abstracted cut-outs) are bonded to the paper in in the printmaking, obtaining a certain embossed feel, adhering to the tactility of the piece. At the same time, Polien worked on an active, kinetic piece in which a thin sheet of raw copper is opposed to a soap-bell-blowing machine, waiting to be stained and deteriorated. The juxtaposition of a very sharp, minimal form with the whimsicality of the free coating soap bells again translates Poliens fascination with the binary relationship between the rational and the irrational into hypnotizing and ephemeral constellations. Rather than creating with an anticipated result in mind, Polien observes how materials interact, how they inscribe traces within each other and create ephemeral results - often submitting her authorship to the laws of trial and chance.