Tom Polo 'linger' 2021

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In linger, Tom Polo continues his exploration into painting as psychological spaces. In Polo's new work, bodies are submerged within a surface of swirling layers of paint, varied brushstrokes and painting techniques that create a complex surface plane where foreground and background appear to merge, melting from one state into the next.

Lingering on a threshold of presence and absence, what is painted in and what is painted out, Polo's figures, - looming characters - are both revealed and concealed creating a surface tension that draws attention to the spaces in-between. The viewer's position, synonymous with the painting's figures as both the looker and the observed, reveals a performative spectatorship. As if waiting in the wings to go on stage, the figures/viewers are simultaneously departing and arriving, embodying a place in which to reside longer than necessary but perhaps uncertain where that place may be.

The debut of a new video installation invites the viewer to engage in a space of witnessing and lingering. This complex relationship of the psyche and the individual, the artist and the subject plays out within Polo's sense of sophisticated theatrics.