CONTRA LA INERCIA AGAINST INERTIA - granada cultura

head, making it a fierce critique of the stagnation
of academic values, the pertinence of the education
system as a whole, of the generalized conformism of
students before the demands of the preceding generation,
or even, who knows, praise of the professors
in their tireless efforts to struggle with pupils that
are normally, to say the least, reluctant to learn.
It is immediately obvious and requires no confirmation
that Paco Pomet’s work is full of a sense of humour,
but careless observation could be misleading.
Comedy is a very serious matter and Pomet often
transforms a smile into panic or melancholy. The
important officer behaving like a child in Recreo may
only be mentally disturbed, probably one of those
madmen that manage armies and order torture, so
that the image is ultimately disturbing. No matter
what interpretation we make of Transporting knowledge,
it will leave us with a profoundly pessimistic
vision of the future. In another painting, we find a
scene we might locate around the 1920s: a group of
well dressed men proudly make a toast beside an old
charabanc, they pose and look at the camera photographing
them, somewhat stupidly, probably drunk,
as if this were a new version of Velazquez’s Los borrachos
(1628-1629). One of them is quite obviously
imbibing and nothing distinguishes the gathering
from what could be the typical snapshot of a happy
(family?) reunion, except that the title is G-30 (2009)
[p. 97], probably in allusion to the select group of
financiers whose decisions change the course of the
international economy according to their own interests.
Which of all these drunks is going to sit at the
wheel of such a jalopy when they start off again after
the formality of the photo? Will they perhaps take
turns while chatting about their boasts? This image is
even more frightening than the former: we are at the
mercy of a band of drunken robbers acting behind the
scenes.
The sense of humour Paco Pomet sets in motion
often works by means of the absurd (Más corto que
de costumbre, [Shorter than Usual] either the barber
or his headless client seems to be saying in a canvas
from 2004), but more often as a searing, methodical
criticism of institutions. As in Goya’s controversial
engravings Los Caprichos, it is the captions to the
images that give meaning to scenes apparently rooted
in the absurd, the nightmarish or the merely anecdotal.
Pomet’s black sense of humour is rooted in the
most poisonous and brilliant areas of Spanish visual
art, from Goya to Buñuel, by way of Solana until
we reach the inimitable cartoons of El Roto, with
which Pomet’s work sometimes has a certain family
resemblance. One must move closer to a painting’s
surface for a moment and observe the face of one of
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