CONTRA LA INERCIA AGAINST INERTIA - granada cultura

exquisite bourgeois interiors of Une semaine de
bonté (1934), the collage-novel by Max Ernst. In
Ness (2008) [p. 12] Pomet presents us with an idyllic
boat trip, perhaps in search of the famous lake
monster, but the indulgent appearance of the scene is
broken as soon as we realise the rower’s head is not
human, but that of a bird – a hybridization with echoes
of Max Ernst’s disturbing bird-men. The monster
is not under the water but on the very surface of the
ordinary, the painter seems to be saying. In both
pieces, Pomet respects and pictorially sustains the
photographic fidelity of the original image as regards
its structure and its spatial and mimetic veracity, but
he breaks the sequence of the ordinary by introducing
and seamlessly assembling an element from the
animal kingdom that utterly overturns the faithful
appearance of the image, bringing us closer to the
fantastic or the dream-like. We might almost use the
words with which Baudelaire described “the great
merit of Goya” as engraver:
(…) of creating the feasibly monstrous. His monsters
were born harmonic and plausible. No-one
has dared like he along the path of the credible
absurd. All those contortions, those beastly faces,
those diabolical grimaces are steeped in humanity.
Even from the specific viewpoint of natural
history, it would be hard to condemn them, such
is the analogy and harmony of all the parts of
their being. In short, it is impossible to seize the
suture line, the point of union between the real
and the fantastic. It is a vague frontier that the
subtlest of analysts could not trace, art is simultaneously
transcendent and natural. 6
In the case of Pomet, it is not only a question of
the study of the natural, but, by contrast, the limitation
to what is photographically real (and even to
the conventionality of the pose in the case of Ness)
that amplifies enormously the unreal effect of the
final image created by him. One might wonder why
he does not make use of collage or photographic
retouching in order to express his work, given that
the raw material is photographic. The answer is
straightforward – the path taken by Pomet quite simply
shares a clearly pictorial tradition in which Goya
stands out more than any one else, but also the legendary
René Magritte (1898-1967). The roots shared
by the work of Paco Pomet and Tansey, developed
by solutions whose similarity is only apparent, are
to be found in the singular representational logic
of the Belgian master. In pieces such as Defensa
(2002) [p. 15] or Interior (2002), Pomet showed the
influence of Magritte’s peculiar lyricism in his repertory
of motifs and in his palette. However, all the
lyricism and chromatic variety that Pomet’s images
(6) Charles Baudelaire. Lo cómico y la
caricatura. Madrid: Antonio Machado
Libros, 2001. p. 187.
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