Enso is the Japanese word for the brushstroke that expresses the moment when the mind is free to let the body create, the brush stroke symbolizing enlightenment, strength and elegance. Invited to participate in the Ewing Gallery’s exhibition Three Artists, Three Continents, Polívka hung a series of drawings named, Bardo, after the Tibetan Book of the Dead. A large, Zen brush-stroke is the anchoring element. The graphite drawings incorporate unreadable mirror-image texts resembling antique Cyrillic lettering on distressed sheets of paper, pulsing with associations. Wishing to synchronize his life with the divine flourish of the enso, Polívka added 39 wooden plates, each holding an ordinary object that the artist might encounter on any given day: a digital media disc, paint brushes, photographs from childhood. In this way, his personal archive is subsumed by the enso. Not a bad trick. The art historian Dorothy Joyner praised Polívka’s ancient alphabets transposed to the gallery space.