It always warms our heart to hear a story about the long-lasting relationship between an artist and a gallery, and the one between Paco Pomet and My Name’s Lolita Art is one of those. Showing with the Spanish gallery since 2006, Paco Pomet opens his seventh solo exhibition Últimas Luces (The Last Lights) this Thursday, November 21st. Featuring 15 new oils on canvas, Pomet celebrates the majestic mountainous region of the Sierra Nevada where he grew up.
"I have always liked the landscape and mountains, in particular. When I was a kid, my family used to enjoy weekends in the countryside, especially around the Sierra Nevada mountains. During winters, we always have the sight of snow-capped peaks in our daily landscape´s background. That may have influenced me since I was little." –Paco Pomet
This grand scenery also fed an ongoing focus on light and monochrome imagery, as he could see these glorious mountains changing throughout the day. However, depicting breathtaking scenery wasn't the primary goal for the Grenada-based artist who found it to be a great setting for a new series of surreal images that impose questions around the subjects of his interest.
Desenlace
Usually working towards creating an alternative, impossible narrative, Pomet this time uses his practice to point out and warn of the ongoing environmental crisis humanity is experiencing worldwide. Coinciding with the upcoming global climate meeting in Madrid, the artist portrays nature's most awe-inspiring regions as fragile settings, emphasizing the influence of human behavior. Further accented by imagery of vintage mountaineers "hiking" into the human environment, the works are visual metaphors for the feeling of lostness shared worldwide. "I find mountaineering imagery very suggestive to convey matters that have to deal with several questions that interest me a lot – the course of time, the unachievable, the power of nature, and the awareness of mankind smallness."
The idea of playing with scale is definitely taken furthest in two new pieces from an ongoing series of work, which features the moon and sun as main characters. "Celestial bodies and stars have fascinated me since I can remember. The sun or the moon is an endless source that throws very strong and mysterious statements for us: time, space, duration, darkness, light, beginning, finalization. Their presence and the power they have to convey feelings have no boundaries."
Perpetuum Mobile
Regularly using light as a tone-setting attribute in his work, Pomet pushes this idea further by incorporating natural light sources as subjects in his work. "I also like to humanize these two celestial characters. By doing this, I can get closer to them and try to bring them to the theater of the human conscience. They can be excellent actors!"
Staying true to his monochrome color palette, a few works feature full-color sections or are entirely rendered using a wider spectrum of hues. En el Camino (On The Road) is an example of such work, originally commissioned for the book cover of a 50th-anniversary edition of the novel On The Road by Jack Kerouac. While mimicking the aesthetic of photos from the '50s, Pomet conveys feelings through the warmth of the sunset light and the repertorial palette used for that. "I don´t usually turn to color in a descriptive way, I use it more as a symbolic tool to point out some areas of a special semantic field," Pomet concludes. - Sasha Bogojev
