Paco Pomet

Paco Pomet - Habi una vez / Once Upon Time

Technique: Silkscreen printing

Artist Biography: Paco Pomet (Granada, 1970) is a Spanish painter who combines painting and photography to create works that disturb the viewer with nods to comics, cinema, television and animation. Although some of his works are humorous, most of them use humor and irony to transmit a critical and committed intention with the contradictions and unreasons of our current world. Pomet's painting is heir to the ancient tradition in Western art in which realism becomes a double-edged sword, where the credible is the starting point from which to arrive at a significant distortion that shocks the viewer. Pomet uses photography as a starting point to emphasize the notion of realism that is then dismantled by discordant elements introduced into the scene. These elements point to the linguistic crisis that defines Western culture. The appropriation of history and distorting elements becomes a critical practice that addresses our time, stigmatized by nihilism and discredit. The most characteristic distorting elements in Pomet's work include hyperbole, personification, metaphor, distortion of scale, decontextualization, absurdity, and the grotesque. In short, Pomet's work seeks to refresh, review and examine what has been learned and inherited, and to nurture an active ingenuity that invites us to look at everything anew with clean eyes and a transparency that questions visual ties, aesthetic debts, dogmas and approved subjects.

 

Paco Pomet (Granada, 1970) The starting point in his creative process, as usual in his production, are documentary photographs from the beginning of the last century. From them, making use of his brush and his subconscious, he transforms them by incorporating strange elements to their original documentary sense. Elements that add irony or critical sense and that make the first canonical images acquire new meanings or none at all after the absurdity and mystery have been able to get the better of them. In most of his works, it is the viewer who must decide, or speculate, what he contemplates: he, and not the artist, is in this case responsible for granting them a more or less narrative sense or an intention. One of the resources most cultivated by Pomet in this purpose of converting a documentary image into a work of his own, ironic and cryptic, is the alteration of the order of the elements of the scene from which he starts, generating a radically different composition, a new "reality" that is not such a reality but the fruit of a creative process marked by imagination. But this is not always his method; it varies according to the context of the original works and what they suggest to the artist. In Pomet's words, "the feeling of strangeness that I sometimes experience when I observe many of the scenes depicted in vintage photographs is greatly amplified when I add changes to the original image. These changes may be structural, tonal, compositional or may simply consist of the substitution, elimination or addition of some element, sometimes very small, that completely disarms the original image from which I start to build my works."