French plastic artist from the world of fashion, Pola 4.0 develops research around image, its construction and what, within it, escapes representation.
Longtime formal matrix of her work and the origin of her pseudonym, the Polaroïd summons the imaginary of the snapshot, the fragment and the accident. Pola 4.0 nevertheless displaces the codes: through photomontage, digital stencil, superposition and mixed techniques, the image is fragmented, recomposed, distanced. A tension is established between what seems to be coming and what is being made, between presence and representation.
This tension extends to the material. Plexiglass, textile, paint, worked aluminum and baroque-inspired moldings make contradictory temporalities and qualities coexist. The old dialogue with the contemporary; fragility with power. Gold intervenes less as a sign of opulence than as light.
The female figures that traverse her work are sensual without being offered, vulnerable without being diminished, sovereign without emphasis. From Inner Queens to Modern Amazons and Untamed ones, they carry the same attention to singularity, self-affirmation and what an image can never fully contain of a being.
Some already belong to a collective visual memory. Coming notably from the imaginary of fashion whose codes the artist knows, these iconic figures are not summoned for their sole celebrity. In Untamed ones, some embody precisely this gap, this assumed singularity that ends up becoming language. Fragmented and recomposed, their images then question both what we believe we recognize and what continues to escape us.
With Between the lines, this research adopts a more silent writing. The Polaroïd format is absent, the signs become rarer. Crossed by a vertical scan and an almost kinetic vibration, the portrait appears, troubles and recomposes with the movement of the gaze. More physically present, it becomes paradoxically more difficult to grasp.
Through these different writings, which coexist rather than succeeding one another, Pola 4.0 works the gap between image and presence, between what the visible reveals and what it can never fully contain.