Tom Polo, linger, 2021. Acrylic and Flashe on canvas, 198 x 213cm. Courtesy: the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney.

Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery presents linger, Tom Polo‘s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

In linger, 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.

The viewer’s position, synonymous with the painting’s figures as both the looker and the observed, reveals 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.  This complex relationship of the psyche and the individual, the artist and the subject plays out within Polo’s sense of sophisticated theatrics.

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