Poe de Laf

Born in Marseille, Poe de Laf lives and works in Barcelona. Introduced to art at an early age, she began painting in oils at sixteen before pursuing doctoral studies in Modern and Contemporary Art History.

Her practice explores memory, identity, imprint, and absence through anthropomorphic figures and objects whose presence remains deliberately ambiguous. Concealed beneath intensely patterned fabrics, bodies lose their defining features. Deprived of faces, age, and clearly defined gender, they become vessels for projection, introspection, and inner experience.

Fabric occupies a central role in her work, functioning simultaneously as a covering, a form of protection, and a means of concealment. It obscures and reveals, tracing the contours of what lies beneath while preserving the suggestion of an absent presence. Through this interplay, painting becomes an act of concealment and revelation, in which something disappears, something endures, and something else emerges.

Moving between the familiar and the uncanny, Poe de Laf invites us to question the structures that shape our sense of identity and the presence our gaze instinctively seeks. Her paintings sustain this tension without resolution, leaving the viewer suspended between what is visible and what remains unknowable.