CONTRA LA INERCIA AGAINST INERTIA - granada cultura

(32) Contribution by Paco Pomet in W.
Manrique Sabogal “Un grito de guerra”, in
Babelia, Suplemento Cultural del Diario El
País, March 5th 2011.
acKnowledGments To Paco Pomet for
his constant attention; to Francisco Baena
for the trust shown; to Eduardo Rodríguez
for his selfless collaboration from Cadiz;
to Alicia Guerrero Yeste for her accurate
advice on animated drawing; and to Rebeca
Yanke for the textual corrections.
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sardonically mock another’s ignorance or madness
(unaware of the sane, socially acceptable game that
we are simply another piece), those that watch the
spectacle (of the armed or sports conflict, or even the
work of art) and smile satisfied with our position as
if the vision did not concern us? The hand mocking
his opponent is that of the modern cynic. The hand
of the painter drawing the scene and revealing the
vertigo is that of the Greek Cynic, located outside
the rules of the game, albeit only virtually, in the heterotopia
of the artistic space. The image breaks the
inertia and freezes the guffaw.
In an ideal world Committees of Public Health
would include artists like Paco Pomet. Instead of
promises or guillotines, they would offer images in
which vision and awareness would be exercised and
renewed by a therapy operating on memory, the immediate
and the universal. The tension established
between the photographic and the pictorial, between
document and fiction, or between nostalgia and the
shocking reminds us that what is put into play here
is nothing more than the old aspiration to build up an
attitude to experience and the world free of impositions.
Pomet has explained it much better than I:
The act of looking causes an excited perplexity
in me. I can’t get used to anything that I see,
and so nothing bores me and nothing entirely
convinces me. The manifestation of the visible
is renewed every instant, although the appearances
and our natural tendency to safety and
protection lead us to think that we have found a
valid, everlasting formula to interpret the world.
It seems that this formula – normally dressed as
culture – is determined to be a sort of armourplating
against something that we are fascinated
by and that we fear: change, uncertainty, the unknown,
the future. That culture we turn to often
operates as a suit of armour, sunglasses, boots, a
compass, air-conditioning apparatus or an umbrella
and ends up preferring to be a prosthesis
that protects us from the rough weather of life’s
meaninglessness. 32