CONTRA LA INERCIA AGAINST INERTIA - granada cultura

(1) Giorgio Vasari. Las vidas de los más
excelentes arquitectos, pintores y escultores
italianos desde Cimabue a nuestros
tiempos. Madrid: Cátedra, 2002. p. 105.
(2) Op. cit., p. 116.
(3) Dani Marco. “Entrevista a Paco Pomet”,
in La palanca de cambio nº 18, December
2009, digital fanzine at: . Last
viewed: 19-09-2011.
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I. GIotto’s Glasses
One of the commonplaces of old artistic historiography
was to place the artist under the sign of precocious
talent from childhood. Speaking of Cimabue,
Vasari tells us that “as he grew, not just his father,
but everyone else recognized his acute genius,” so
that “his father decided to direct him to the study of
literature, (…) but Cimabue (…) spent all day painting
men, horses, buildings and other fanciful figures
in books or on loose sheets, driven by his own nature
that seemed to cause him pain if not exercised.” 1 Of
Giotto, Cimabue’s disciple, he tells us that “in all
his still childish acts he displayed an extraordinarily
vivid, aware intelligence despite his youth” and that
“he had an innate inclination for drawing, which
often led him to depict for pleasure natural or imaginary
figures on stones, earth or sand.” 2 When asked
about his beginnings in painting, Paco Pomet told
his interviewer a story that is both a re-reading and a
curious deviation from Vasari’s topos:
Although it may sound like a commonplace for
a painter or draughtsman, I began to draw like
mad when I was very small. I was a shy, homeloving
child, perhaps a little introverted, and I
spent hours looking at everything. My parents
like to say I’ve always been very observant and
since I was very tiny I looked at everything very
attentively, but the truth is really that I couldn’t
see very well and I had to get glasses when I was
five years old, when they realised that I had great
difficulty reading. So it wasn’t that I was very
observant, but that I used to stare a lot and open
my eyes wide just to distinguish things. When
they finally got me glasses I suddenly discovered
the world was made in high definition, that what
I had been seeing before was “low”, and I discovered
textures, clean edges, dust, little reflections,
I became fascinated with the act of looking, of
being able to distinguish infinite details that I
hadn’t been able to see before, and I was trapped
forever by the amazing variety of the visible.
This rediscovery of things then lead me to enjoy
recreating them on white sheets of paper, likewise
fascinated by the details appearing from the
point of a pencil or a ballpoint. 3
Vasari did not merely coin a commonplace in artistic
literature; he sought to re-establish the myth of
Painting, that strange discipline that, after innumerable,
clumsy last rites, also persists in the work of
the painter concerning us here. The comic touch to
Pomet’s story is an accurate foretaste of what is to
be found in his canvases, but more particularly this
little text contains a substantial metaphor about the