Paco Pomet

Paco Pomet - Once upon a time / eleven upon time

Técnica: Serigraphy

Biografía del Artista: Paco Pomet (Granada, 1970) is a Spanish painter who combines painting and photography to create works that disturb the viewer with allusions to comics, film, television and animation. Although some of his works are humorous, most use humor and irony to convey a critical and committed intention towards the contradictions and unreasonableness 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 a significant distortion is reached that shakes 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 of Pomet's work include hyperbole, personification, metaphor, distortion of scale, decontextualization, absurdity and the grotesque. In short, Pomet's work seeks to refresh, revise and examine what has been learned and inherited, and to nourish an active naivety that invites us to look at everything anew with clear eyes and a transparency that questions visual constraints, aesthetic debts, dogmas and approved subjects.

Paco Pomet (Granada, 1970) The starting point in his creative process, as is usual in his production, are documentary photographs dated at the beginning of the last century. From them, using his brush and his subconscious, he transforms them by incorporating elements that are foreign to their original documentary meaning. Elements that add irony or critical sense and that make the canonical first images acquire new meanings or none at all after the absurd and the mystery have overcome them. In most of his works, it is the viewer who must decide, or speculate, what he is looking at: he, and not the artist, is in this case responsible for granting them a more or less narrative meaning or intention. One of the resources most cultivated by Pomet in his aim of converting a documentary image into his own work, 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 a reality at all but the fruit of a creative process marked by imagination. But this is not always his method; it varies depending on 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 described in vintage photographs is greatly amplified when I add changes to the original image. These changes can be structural, tonal, compositional, or they can simply consist of the substitution, elimination or addition of some element, sometimes very small, which completely dismantles the original image from which I start to build my works."