Paco Pomet "Montaigne's Nightmare"
Monya Rowe Gallery
This event has ended.
Pomet’s new series of paintings continues to reference Vintage photographs as the primary source for the subject matter. Subverting the original image by adding a surreal edge allows each painting to oscillate between fiction and reality. In El Becario (2010), a historical picture of a banal office scene is transformed into a witty psychological caricature. A mans face, comically distorted, unabashedly stares at the viewer making it unclear whether the viewer is being ridiculed, or if the artist is ridiculing his own self-awareness.
A similar predilection for irony is present in Fable (2010), a vintage photograph (c. 1870) depicting a group of Russian Cossacks proudly showing off their kill (a dead tiger) is turned into a farcical display. Pomet challenges and questions the masculinity associated with hunting by replacing the mens faces with those of carton-like catheads. In doing so, the hunters become submissive, loveable and cute. Pomet uses humor as a vehicle to alter original pictorial motives, and deny its’ affirmations. Whimsical pop-culture references are often paired with war and politics. The artists’ propensity for deformation- physical, optical and compositional- forces the viewer to think about the pictorial space and decipher what is real or imagined.
Media
Schedule
from September 10, 2010 to November 13, 2010
Opening Reception on 2010-09-10 from 18:00 to 20:00