Paco Pomet - Bendixen Contemporary Art, Copenhagen

'Twilight' - 2015, oil on canvas, cm 120 x 160


SOLO EXHIBITION BY PACO POMET (ES)


October 9 – November 14, 2015

Opening reception: Friday, October 9, 5-7 PM (Fredag, d.9 Okt, kl.17-19)
Palægade 5, 1261 Copenhagen K.
 Denmark
Phone: +45 2125 2325 & + 45 2197 2525
e-mail: bendixen@contemporary-art.dk
Wednesday – Friday: 12-17, Sat: 12 – 15



In this new small group of paintings presented for this new solo show, again no attempt of a “series” has been made.
Working from vintage documentary photographs, most of them found in public archives, my attention was recently focused in images of people in many different scenarios.
Most of the “sources” used as starting points for these paintings consist in photographs of people doing a specific task (working mainly). The pictures were taken indoors and outdoors, specially at the beggining of the XX century.
Once an image is chosen, most part of it is used to build a new painted image, but some parts of the original photograph are changed, ignored or replaced so the resultant image adopts a complete new meaning. A meaning that can be meningless: surreal, paradoxical, humorous, absurd, misterios, bizarre (many adjectives could fit here...)
It could be inferred that there is a common story line here, but it is a blurry line whatsoever.
We find ourselves faced with images that present scenes where unexpected and dreamlike situations take place. Apparently there is a specific task that has to be accomplished by the characters depicted but unexpectedly the viewer realizes that there is something wrong or weird going on in the scene. The viewer suddenly figures out that an uneasy feeling grabs him, due to the impossibility to clarify the meaning and the purpose of the scene presented. Then a sense of incongruity or detachment traps him.
The feeling of strangeness that sometimes I experience when I observe many of the scenes described in vintage photographs gets amplified enormously in this paintings by adding this edgy changes and manipulatios.
I try to destabilize, disarrange and alter the order of the elements that configure the structure of the scene in each painting, so the resulting image proposes a new visual order. Due to the alterations, changes and glitches inflicted, the traditional construction of a scene and its components, become dismantled. Then, a new reality (though surreal) overcomes.
In each of the works presented I draw on different procedures to build these visual paradoxes.
The methods vary, and the tricks and alterations inflicted depend on what the scene suggests in each case.
It could be inferred that there are some kafkaesque riddles that imbue these works, or even a more humorous condition that is in debt with films like Chaplin´s Modern Times.

Paco Pomet