CONTRA LA INERCIA AGAINST INERTIA - granada cultura

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building as if it were a cow. These works are underlain
by a view of life as a journey fatally linked to places or
buildings that act simultaneously as objects of ambition
and as existential hindrances.
In El heredero (2006) [p. 119] and Heiress (2010)
Paco Pomet again takes up these concepts, synthesizing
a melancholy vision of the individual and the
conditioning he is subjected to from the sphere of the
private and familial and at a stage of life the artist
returns to again and again – childhood. Both canvasses
consist in the alteration of studio photographs
where a boy in one and a girl in the other pose for
the camera with obvious discomfort. Everything on
the canvas is eloquent: the faces stare straight at us
pathetically, and, following old customs not entirely
forgotten, the child’s clothing attempts to make it
look like an adult. The dramatic effect is produced by
a sort of surgical-pictorial intervention that removes
the legs from the bodies, replacing them with the legs
of the furniture which, following the universal stereotype
of the full-length portrait, accompanies the figure
to make up the composition. The substitution trick
is even more obvious when we compare the painting
of the boy with the original image used by Pomet
– a photograph by the Peruvian Martín Chambi (1891-
1973) titled Boy with Hat (1928). The tone and haggard
expression of the charmless faces and bodies
Martín Chambi Jiménez: Child with Hat, 1928
Martín Chambi Photographic Archive
Paco Pomet: El heredero, 2006
oil on canvas, 120 × 103 cm
would have been sufficient to take apart like a mask
the artificial, bourgeois, affected stereotype of the
child portrait, but Pomet’s logic intervenes to lead the
image towards the terrain of the monstrous and the
grotesque. It does so with the particularity that here
it does not rest at the mere surgical trick – the reification
undergone by these children is also the sickly appearance,
the physical expression of a life’s journey
that has scarcely begun in which an above all moral
and social material legacy holds them back, paralyzes
them and incorporates them into the furniture of a