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Ariane de Polignac is a French artist based in London, currently studying at Chelsea College of Arts and a 2024 graduate of Central Saint Martins. Working primarily in painting, her practice is a visceral inquiry into womanhood, the duality of being body and soul and the fragility of our physical form as a vessel for consciousness.

In her debut exhibition, she presents Tous Les Autres Ensemble, a triptych consisting of three works titled Celui Qui Méprise, Celui Qui Est, and Celui Qui Cherche. The paintings offer a personal and philosophical exploration of the female experience of how it is shaped, observed, and internalized.

Her work draws heavily from literature and philosophy, informed by texts such as Women at Point Zero, Wide Sargasso Sea, and Ways of Seeing. John Berger’s reflections on the gaze, alongside Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage, form a conceptual spine for the triptych. As Berger writes: “A woman is always accompanied, even when quite alone, by her own image of herself… She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life.”

This internalized surveillance becomes a central thread in her paintings not as a condemnation, but as a poetic and painful reality. The work examines the emotional weight of performing normality, a theme deepened by the artist’s own experience as a woman with Asperger’s. Like many women on the spectrum, she learned to “mask” her difference from a young age, adopting a persona to navigate social expectations.

Through color an emotionally charged and intuitive force in her practice she gives form to these invisible tensions. Her process is unplanned yet deeply rooted in research, memory, and embodied experience. The brush becomes an instrument of translation, carrying hours of thought into immediate, expressive gestures.

This work does not aim to assign blame. Rather, it invites reflection asking not “Who is responsible?” but “How does it feel?” It is an offering to those who recognize themselves in its depths, and an invitation to others to look more closely.