Pomet grew up between the city of Grenada, where he was born in 1971, and a small town, Cordoba - his father’s hometown. As Pomet himself explains, his paintings hold a distinctively Iberian sensibility. The cynicism in his work exposes a historical residue of a totalitarian Franco regime that meant fatalism was “an ingredient almost omnipresent in our culture.” In post-Franco Spain, Pomet’s traditional art education at the University of Granada focused on landscapes, portraits and still life. While he found this approach limiting, it edified his need to resist through artistic expression. As a result, he developed the unique juxtapositions of his work: hyperreal monochrome figures and landscapes punctuated by piercing colour, cartoons, lightsabers, elongated limbs, and foreboding masses of pink bubblegum. Taking inspiration from vintage photographs, along with his own popular culture references, Pomet’s paintings both honour and ridicule the absurd world around him.

In 2015, Pomet exhibited at Banksy’s controversial project, Dismaland, a dilapidated theme park in Weston-super-Mare with moody attendants and broken-down rides. The show attracted unprecedented media attention, as well as more visitors than the Tate and V&A’s biggest shows from the same year. Internacional (2008), one of Pomet’s few works sourced from a contemporary colour photograph, was included in the exhibition. The painting depicts Chadian soldiers in the desert, driving into battle with weapons flailing. At the front of the truck, screaming among the seemingly jovial men, is an intruder: the Cookie Monster. Imposing this comic, fictional icon of children’s television, with the archetypal media image of the conflict between Chad and Libya during the 1980s - somewhat crudely nicknamed ‘The Toyota War’ - provokes a dark and unsettling humour that bluntly questions the sensationalism of modern media and entertainment.

Paco Pomet

Spanish

Main

Artist

Printer

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Internacional (2021)