Paco Pomet

Paco Pomet (Granada, 1970) is a Spanish painter who combines painting and photography to create works that disturb the viewer with nods 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 toward the contradictions and absurdities 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 believability is the starting point from which a significant distortion is reached that shocks the viewer. Pomet uses photography as a starting point to emphasize the notion of realism, which 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, review, and examine what has been learned and inherited, and to foster an active ingenuity that invites us to look at everything anew with clear eyes and a transparency that questions visual constraints, aesthetic debts, dogmas, and approved subjects.