The Nights - Dead Leaves - Limited Edition 1 of 5 Photograph

“I want to tell a story.” This is what Pauline Thomas aims for through her various works. She seeks to enhance the real—not to embellish it, but to question and provoke reflection in a sensory way; to open souls and eyes to parallel realities; to interrogate nature and transcend genders. For this artist, composition is created by the play of lighting angles and colors, rather than the subject itself. Her desire is to conjure another reality through ambiguity. This is eroticism as understood by Georges Bataille: the tension of continuity in the relation between two opposites. The works shown in New York as part of The Other Art Fair—and taken from the series Gorgeous and Les Nuits—are the illustration of this. The series Les Nuits (2015-2016) consists of photographs of painted objects found in nature. The essence of these discarded elements changes in the dark, emanating a contradictory sensation, of beauty and death. “Unlike traditional paintings and photographs of still lives, the scene is not more realistic. It depicts an advanced stage of passing, inspiring a meditation on the ephemeral nature of things.” In Gorgeous (2007-2011)—the title plays upon the French word for “throat” (gorge)— the natural power of this part of the female body is displayed in 123 images that capture the neck thrust upward in a ecstatic position. “As each woman voluptuously exposed their neck to me, she revealed a curious phallic identity, and I thought that including men’s necks too might also disclose a different understanding of the female gender. Who is man? Who is woman?” Whatever the medium, Pauline Thomas’s oeuvre proffers a fascinating quest that serves the sublimation of a frozen reality. “I like transition, change of state, the vitiation between two [visual] fields. Because it also symbolizes emotional vistas, that moment when the worlds of day and night meet. Where everything fades, to create another reality.” This is the moment for which the artist lies in wait, to extract and bring to light the points of fracture where perfect reality and nighttime reality finally converse. Those infinite moments where the mysterious meanings of things and of beings come to the surface. And which offer to our gaze the sublimation of gender and nature through painting and light.