CONTRA LA INERCIA AGAINST INERTIA - granada cultura

(4) Marie-Loup Sougez (ed.). Historia
general de la fotografía. Madrid: Ediciones
Cátedra, 2007. p. 217.
(5) Roland Barthes. La cámara lúcida.
Madrid: Paidós, 2010. p. 117.
132
a very well known fact that famous great painters
turned very quickly to Photography as an auxiliary
tool in the creation of their works. Going against
the opinion generally held among the painters of his
time, Delacroix openly recognised the usefulness of
this new medium for his needs 4 , and we know that
Courbet made use of dozens of photographs to compose
his figures. Many more were to come later, but
they all conceived of Photography as a mere instrumental
support, a model that the painter’s skill had to
correct or improve. Roland Barthes established that
Photography involved a radically exact capture of
reality 5 , but all the painters that made use of it kept
up a constant struggle to tone down this radicality,
at least until the arrival of hyper-realism. The fact is
that while Photography fought with determination
throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to ultimately
achieve its own artistic status in the avant-gardes of
the inter-war years (Man Ray, like Félix Nadar was,
curiously, a failed painter), painters, especially those
closest to academic style, continued to make use of
photographs without this leading to any sort of conflict,
but without the relation becoming as obvious as
it is, for example, in Pomet’s canvasses.
It was not until the mid-20th century, with artists
such as Robert Rauschenberg and his combine paintings,
that Photography became palpably present
in pictorial discourse, even though it was more as
an object than a bearer of its own visual rhetoric.
Throughout the 1960s, Gerhard Richter (Dresden,
1932) opened up a controversial field of experimentation
by pictorially recreating photographs in his
canvases in an integral manner. However, this had
little or nothing to do with the hyper-realist school
(whose brief journey, wherever it was subjected
to the orthodox loyalty to a photographic support,
proved to be artistically sterile), but rather with the
crucial moment when Painting began to use its own
means to investigate what a photograph is beyond
the mere object or model for the copier, what it can
tell us and, above all, how it tells us, what it hides
and what can be obtained from its translation to the
surface of a canvas. What Richter questioned in his
work is something that could serve to introduce Paco
Pomet’s universe of images.
Young Pomet’s fascination with the variety of the
visible revealed to him through the optics of a simple
pair of glasses was no more than a foretaste of
the fascination that Photography – that outstanding
daughter of Optics – was to open up to the painter
from the first moment he adopted figuration as
his only vehicle of expression. There are probably
several reasons why Pomet turned to Photography:
first of all, because only this medium can hold com-