Spanish-born painter Paco Pomet is showing a new body of work titled No Places with Galleri Benoni in Copenhagen. Pomet builds out his photographic universe more and more with each show, including his show at Richard Heller Gallery last August. His masterful painting abilities lend themselves to vivid recreations of vintage photographs, bathing them with vibrant color to offset their desaturated, monochromatic tones.
"Very often I experience a strong sense of strangeness when I observe scenes described in photographs found at random. This feeling becomes greater the more anodyne the image is. In most cases, this happens with amateur photography, documentary archives, anonymous images or found in family albums of unknown origin. These types of photographic sources, which I take as reference for the development of my works, provide an ideal material from which to start to work. Once the motifs for the pictorial compositions are taken, a game comes into play in which all those references are subject to alterations that may be structural, tonal, compositional or that may simply consist in the substitution, elimination or addition of elements, sometimes very small, that completely disarm the original image from which I start to develop my pictorial work.
I try to destabilize, disrupt and alter the order that configures the structure of the scene in each work. The resulting image proposes a new visual order. Due to these alterations, changes and dysfunctions the conventional construction of a scene and its components are definitely dismantled. The testimonial character of the photographic sources gives way to the uncertainty, the strangeness and the disorientation that the resulting pictorial images communicate. Then a new reality (which ultimately consists in the construction of an unreality) arises, and we can define it as a no place or a place that can only admit the presence of the imagination of the viewer "
PACO POMET (Granada, Spain, 1970) lives and works in his hometown. Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Granada in 1993, he completed studies at the School of Visual Arts (New York, USA, 2004). He has enjoyed several scholarships abroad: Academy of Spain in Rome (1999-2000), Fortuny Scholarship (Venice, Italy, 2000), College of Spain (Paris, France, 2004). In 2010 he received the "Excellent Work Price" at the Beijing Bienniale (China, 2010).
In 2015 he took part in DISMALAND, Bemusement Park, the exhibition organized by Banksy in Weston-Super-Mare (United Kingdom), where he exhibited his work with Banksy, Damien Hirst, Jenny Holzer and David Shrigley among other artists. Between the end of 2015 and March 2016, his work was the subject of the first retrospective of his work in an American museum: The Baker Museum, Naples (Florida).
