TOM POLO

Working across painting and installation, Polo explores how conversation, gesture and exchange become embodied acts of portraiture. Moving between abstraction and figuration, his paintings blur boundaries between self and other, revealing the complexities of identity and human connection.

In this new body of work, Polo turns to the psychology of mirroring. Influenced by the social encounters and time spent with others invited into the studio, he borrows and translates fragments of these interactions – gestures, conversations and, physical proximities – into painterly form. In doing so, he captures the intimacy and theatricality of the human experience, presenting his paintings as both mirror and portal.

Through a lens of loss and reflection, many of Polo’s new works are guided by ideas of the body’s shifting capacities as both physical and emotional states. Within this context, the studio takes on new resonance as a space where presence and absence coexist, and where encounters with others echo both the fragility and strength of the body itself. Returning to oil stick, Polo embraces a more tactile approach to mark making, allowing gesture and touch to register more immediately on the surface. Painted limbs and body parts often appear as fragmented rock-like forms, traces of the body translated into visual narrative and suspended in liminality.

The term ‘bodycave’ evokes a space that is at once both internal and external, seen and unseen, revealed and concealed. By positioning the body as a vessel for contemplation, Polo explores how we inhabit our own forms and carry within us what is both visible and hidden. In these portraits, he translates that tension into visual narrative: a meditation on embodiment, vulnerability, and the performative nature of being.