In this new body of work, soft secrets, Tom Polo works exclusively on paper and continues his investigations into figurative abstraction. Every panel has been treated with the hallmarks of his practice; broad, vibrant washes of colour and confident line work gently merge into suggestive figurations. Each work in soft secrets is a unique character, their role authored by Polo through the gesture and directional gaze he creates especially for them. These characters are informed by the artist’s ongoing and consuming observations of the people and interactions happening around him. Polo is interested in acts of looking and how this can inform our very being within lived experience. He distills this broad, conceptual realm into nuanced mannerisms responding to stimuli — the way a hand might curl its fingers, how expression can settle in the lips or the flash of darting eyes.
Over time Polo has built a significant swathe of memories and documented gestures that he recalls and reinvents as he forms each figure, or character. This series presents a deepening intensity between the artist and his reference material, exemplified in the variation of marks present from panel to panel. Polo currently works with acrylic, Flashe and wax pastel. This trio of materials lends itself to many dilutions and intensities which he embraces in process, deciding when to build or layer upon his workings of the paper, or to erase them. There are moments where Polo has diluted the paint to just an inkling of its original hue, in dissolve and disappear yellow settles as an aura over the figure. In contrast, it is over the intensity of the blue coloured paint in wallow, swallow and its response to the paper that Polo sketches a more defined figure in wax pastel. Polo brings definition in and out of soft secrets with deftness but maintains a hovering sense of desire within each character, to be both the stimuli and the stimulated.