Mc Queen 21000102, 2025

Pola 4.0  

A French visual artist with a background in fashion, Pola 4.0 develops a practice centred on the image, its construction, and what remains beyond the reach of representation.

The Polaroid, which long provided the formal framework for her work and inspired her artistic name, evokes the fleeting instant, the fragment and the unexpected. Yet Pola 4.0 moves beyond its familiar codes. Through photographic collage, digital stencilling, layering and mixed media, images are fragmented, reconfigured and held at a distance. A tension emerges between spontaneity and construction, presence and representation.

This tension extends into the materiality of the work. Plexiglass, textiles, paint, worked aluminium and Baroque-inspired mouldings bring together contrasting visual languages and temporalities. The historical enters into dialogue with the contemporary; fragility coexists with strength. Gold appears less as a symbol of opulence than as a source of light.

The female figures inhabiting her work are sensual without being offered to the gaze, vulnerable without being diminished, sovereign without ostentation. From Les Reines Intérieures to Les Amazones Modernes and Les Indomptés, her work explores individuality, self-determination and everything that an image can never fully contain of a human being.

Some of these figures already belong to our collective visual memory. Drawn in part from the world of fashion, whose codes the artist knows intimately, these iconic personalities are not represented merely for their fame. In Les Indomptés, they embody the very difference and uncompromising individuality through which they became icons. Their reworked images question both what we believe we recognise and what continues to elude us.

With Entre les lignes, this exploration takes on a quieter visual language. The Polaroid format recedes, and the visual signs become more restrained. Traversed by a vertical rhythm and an almost kinetic vibration, the portrait emerges, dissolves and reassembles as the viewer changes position. More physically present, the subject becomes paradoxically more elusive.

Across these distinct yet coexisting bodies of work, Pola 4.0 investigates the space between image and presence, between what the visible reveals and what it can never entirely disclose.