PACO POMET’s Surrealist Visual Games
Playing with vibrant colour, absurd details and shifts in perspective, Paco Pomet is an artist that demonstrates a propensity for surrealism, successfully converging fiction and reality in his oil paintings.
Pomet’s interests lie in exploring the grey area between the commonplace and the absurd –subverted landscapes and portraits borrow from sepia-toned vintage photographs resembling historical documents, the degree of manipulation of these sources varying from subtle to explicit and unrestrained.
Previous exhibitions include Shipwrecks, shown in Copenhagen’s Bendixen Contemporary Art gallery with works showcasing Pomet’s playful and oneiric style:
“Paco Pomet's paintings are visual games. At first sight they show a recognisable environment, but before long, the imitation of reality tips over into an illogical narrative that draws on the symbolic language of Magic Realism…. The author, as he has always done, invites the spectator to enter an exercise of interpretation where the constructive elements of the images are divested of all conventionality.”
Unambiguously titled Obra Reciente (‘recent work’), Pomet’s most recent exhibition in Madrid’s My Name’s Lolita Art gallery sees the artist tackling industrial progress as it took place early in the twentieth century.
Modifying source material from American municipal files, Pomet comments on civilizational regression, evident in the wounds inflicted to the landscapes portrayed – ‘Rojo’ (‘red’) depicts felled trees with their insides exposed and the workmen responsible flecked with a red element suggestive of blood. ‘Fin de siècle’ shows prospectors basking in the golden glow of the new century’s roman numerals, those of the last eerily looming over them in the background wooden and grayscale; the images are tainted with proleptic irony, the onslaught on the environment that would take place over the next century evident to all but those portrayed.
Completing a Fine Arts Degree at the University of Granada in Spain, Pomet went on to study at the School of Visual Arts in New York; He currently lives and works in Granada.
Paco Pomet
