CONTRA LA INERCIA AGAINST INERTIA - granada cultura

wider décor in which we shall soon not be able to discern
“between the feeling of obligation and will.”
Without falling into sterile determinism, Paco Pomet
denounces that the possibility of liberation and the
construction of a truly personal identity can require
an arduous journey. There is no hint of humour
when we see that the mother holding a baby in her
arms in Custodia (2008) [p. 117] has a monstrous
horse’s head that none of her children seem to notice.
The idyllic scene already described in Ness (2008)
[p. 12] undergoes a diametric inversion in Rehén
(2010): a boat trip is transformed into a horrific
scene of initiation for a child looking terrified at the
water and mockingly observed by the members of its
family, all equipped with a duck’s bill instead of a
mouth (a hybridization clearly originating in a Walt
Disney aesthetic). The labels of surreal and shocking
are not enough to define the enormous disquiet
that the old theme of the individual’s conforming to
the environment can reach in each of these images.
Equally, Pomet’s visual language demands that the
viewer as individual shed his culturally acquired
perceptive habits to access his own interpretation of
what he is seeing:
The figurative play into which I normally plunge
when I paint helps me to refresh, revise and
examine what I have learnt and inherited, and
attempts to feed an active naivety that invites one
to look at everything anew with transparency and
expectation, questioning visual restraints, aesthetic
debts, dogmas and exams passed. 25
VII. aGaInst the PromIsed land
In the truly inverted world, what is true is a moment of what is false.
Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
Kavafis said that it is only at the end of a life full
of experiences, calamities and satisfactions that we
could understand what the Ithacas are, which are the
final spark of consciousness that would free us from
the desire to reach a place that, quite simply, does
not exist outside literature. Guy Debord, on the other
hand, warned that the promise of welfare and its inseparable
and constant dissatisfaction were the main
cause of alienation for man immersed in a model
of exploitation peculiar to our specific time that he
called the Society of the Spectacle. The radical difference
between Homer’s Ithaca and the land promised
by the consumer society is that while the former
is an incentive for the construction of the hero, the
latter only creates dissatisfied automata. So, what is
the Promised Land? What are the Promised Lands?
(25) This contribution by Paco Pomet can
be found in W. Manrique Sabogal “Un grito
de guerra”, in Babelia, Suplemento Cultural
del Diario El País, March 5th 2011.
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