Pola Carmen

Pola Carmen was born in 1953. She studied painting at the École de Beaux-Arts in Tours, then ceramics at ENSAAMA. Pola Carmen also attended the Pascal de Vautibault sculpture studio in Paris.
"We often deal with the relationship between line and figure when analyzing painted work. Here, it's the line that becomes the figure.
What imposes itself is not a choice, it's like a vital currents. A territory is covered, traced by fragile interlacing, tightly woven, fleeing from the horizontal, carried by a hand moving, crossing, revealing a kind of large figure with features of the same color.
These lines are never separative. They come together in labor. The oil pastel gives the lines density and color, echoing and playing with the monochrome background (both base and depth) to create unity and order.
Time passes through these meshes. Coverage is never complete. Each time, a hole (erosion, tearing, unravelling?) leaves a free escape that we don't know if it marks the origin or the end.
The world is larger than the canvas, and one responds to the other, enlarging it. Two lines that cross can begin a destiny. No one can stop this trace and passage.
Pola Carmen loves to celebrate the essential encounter between the works of Pierrette Bloch and Agnès Martin. They teach us about the long haul and solitude of the long-distance runner. Breath is never in short supply."

——François Barré, former president of the Centre Pompidou

"What I do is not a fabric, not a grid, nor paths that cross, just hand-drawn lines, with the fragility that implies, it doesn't look like anything identifiable. I don't want anyone to recognize anything. It's a space of freedom in which to experiment with line in all its states". Just that.
——Pola Carmen