Victim of the Light

A conversation between art critic, writer and curator Sasha Bogojev and Paco Pomet in December of 2022, commissioned by House of Pomet, and first published in the book Celestial in 2023.

Sasha Bogojev: When we spoke over the phone the other day you told me that you weren't aware of how many works with celestial bodies you've done over the years. Does that mean that you have never planned them as a subject for a series?

Paco Pomet: I mean, every once in a while I was attracted by the idea of digging into that subject because I've always liked the beginnings of the days and the end of the days. So, the frontier barrier of time that appears at the end and at the beginning of the day was something that I always liked. And from time to time I would really look forward to starting another painting with this subject matter.

Also, personalising the figures to get closer to a more, let's say, light-hearted kind of representation. Not a very serious one or a very romantic one, "Romantic" as in 19th-century terminology.

SB: So where did the idea for a book come from?

PP: The idea of doing this book came from an English collector and a friend, Steve Barding. He wanted to gather the paintings together because he saw what I didn't realise - I have done so many paintings on this subject. I'm not normally really keen about making series, but this came without noticing, without planning.

SB: Does it change the way you look at them or the way you experience them, now that you see them kind of as a series?

PP: It changes in a way that I have been continuously digging into that idea and I became aware of the importance of the questions that arise when I see these works - about the passage of time, about melancholy, and maybe the idea that a whole lifetime can be compressed into a day. I really like what these images can suggest.

SB: And it is also a great field to exercise the play with the light, the glow, and the shadow, right?

PP: Yeah, that's right. Because before this series I was sticking to the kind of monochromatic painting and I started to put this glow and also these contrasting colours in 2016-2017. I mean, I've done this before, but not that accurately or with that interest. So I think these features emerged or did so more frequently and stronger from that moment.

Paco Pomet | Furtive Dusk, 2022 | Detail

SB: And why were you leaning towards monochrome? What is the idea behind that approach?

PP: Well, I was always more into drawing than using colour. Since I was very little, I was drawing more than painting. And I come from a comic school in the way that I've always liked to copy and draw comics or cartoons. So, my formation, my education, and my process has been more from the drawing than the colour. That's why I work with monochromatic imagery. 

And also because of the influence of the old silent films, black and white photography, especially things I've seen on TV when I was young. Such as the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, and Buster Keaton movies. I think I was really in love with this and that continued to photography, which I was interested in as a teenager. 

I also liked history so I've been looking at a lot of black and white documentary photos. But at some point, I needed more colour or maybe a symbolic way of managing colour. And I started to look at these possibilities of adding it, not as a descriptive tool, but as a symbolic one, pointing out parts of the painting.

SB: As in accentuating some parts?

PP: Yeah, accentuating and guiding the view of the spectator while trying to convey some meaning. Even though sometimes the meanings are interpretable, they are not closed ones. In a way, I want to start a path with flashing lights. They are lighthouses in a painting. I like that metaphor.

SB: That is a beautiful metaphor, indeed. But those influences you mentioned all have a strong element of humour to them too, right?!

PP: Yeah, absolutely. All the films that I was more attracted to were the humorous ones - Marx Brothers, Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy. So yeah, humour has been getting into my work without me even noticing it. I don't force that, it just happens.

SB: Yeah, I always enjoy that - it doesn't feel like the works are made to be a joke, but there's this lighthearted element in them. So my question is - do you ever catch yourself restraining from making it maybe too funny, too jokey?

PP: Lighthearted is a nice way of putting it. I feel restrained in the sense that I really don't want to be so clearly humorous. When you see a joke coming, then it is not funny. It's like when I try hard to think about the subject or I try to rationalise or be too analytical, it doesn't work. And humour is a little bit like this. I really admire comedians, I really am amazed by their skills, and I think one of the most difficult tasks ever is to be a humorist. I admire them and I don't try to be one but humorous images or situations keep coming to my head. 

SB: Were you always feeling this way towards it?

PP: I always liked telling jokes. When I was a teenager, I’d remember a lot of jokes and I used to tell jokes with my friends. I think it's an incredible language engineering weapon. Same with visual jokes. I really love people like Gary Larson or El Roto, a Spanish cartoonist, and I found their cartoons to be like little jewels. I think they have a very powerful potential or very powerful message inside, much stronger than the one of complex, serious thought or philosophical thought. Like aphorisms. For example, Ramón Gomez Serna, a Spanish writer who wrote Greguerias. Greguerias are very short and sophisticated jokes, written in a single phrase, like a really sharp, witty, powerful, absurd, and ironic aphorism.

SB: Are the lighthearted jokes and the addition of humour the idea behind the way you mix realities? Because this is kind of your signature trick...

PP: Yeah, because in a way it is a path to express the perplexity of human life or the life on this planet. Human beings are a really strange species and I don't really understand how we can behave as we do. If any form of life from another planet came and saw us, I believe they would think we are absolutely absurd! Of course, we cannot see ourselves from the outside, because we are here and it is a very difficult exercise. 

For example, seeing the Monty Python sketches, I think there is more philosophy, and more knowledge about human behaviour there than in, let’s say, Russian novels from the 19th century. And I can see more explanations about our way of being on Earth in humour and in absurdity than in many other artistic or philosophical statements.

Paco Pomet | Eclipse, 2018 | Detail

SB: I was always wondering actually if this mixing of realities is more of a narrative-driven or conceptual kind of a thing, or is it a more aesthetic decision?

PP: It's aesthetic, but it cannot be narrative because narration is something that goes with the written language or the cinema. Static images are not good for that. They have a really big presence and can make really big statements, but not narration. Telling stories is not the field of painting. Displaying a presence, a very strange presence, grotesque or weird can be very shocking. A really interesting astonishment appears while trying to portray the world in a very unexpected way. Sometimes we can find unexpected discoveries, incarnated in very convincing visual constructions, even though we are not really getting to any satisfactory conclusion. It is another kind of knowledge, perhaps cryptical. I believe that sometimes we get more answers from those points of view than from a really cerebral, analytical, or scientific approach.

SB: For me, it feels that, in a perspective of a commentary of humanity, your work is a mood board or hint in which way to observe life, rather than statements or definitions of things. Is this the reason why the work feels very timeless and nonspecific? 

PP: That's a nice point you're talking about because I'm really interested in trying to do a timeless kind of statement. I feel that all semantic worries and interests remain the same even though the ways and techniques that express them are changing. 

That's why, for example, I don’t think it is particularly positive trying to grab the attention of children by updating classic stories. If you modernise stories that are written centuries ago, then the children won’t learn history. So they will not know that things were different before, even though the themes and the matters remain the same. This way of adapting things can perhaps lead to censorship in the end, or make our children more ignorant. And that's something that I'm really aware of and I try to not lose track of what we have been preceded by in history. 

SB: So the moon and sun are put both as symbolics and also as a way of adding colours, a way of playing with light. Is this light play something that you found interesting from traditional, let's say painting, classical painting?

PP: Yeah, I've always liked the golden age of Dutch painting, or John Constable, or Caspar David Friedrich's paintings. That way of representing landscapes as a reflection of emotions and feelings, it's one of my favourite ways in painting. So when I go to museums I go directly to Hobbema and Ruisdael, all these painters of landscapes. I really love them.

Even though some of the still lifes are marvellously painted, or figures of saints and Christ, I can't help going through the landscapes and trying to lose myself inside them. I also think that the 19th-century Hudson River School in the United States is very underrated, with the works by Thomas Cole and Albert Bierstadt for example. I think Romanticism, not only in painting but also in music, might be my most favourite time of the arts. The 19th century started with Goya in painting and with Beethoven in music, and I think it is one of the peaks of universal art. I mean, we are so tired of learning about Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo, over and over again, but the 19th century was amazing. In painting, literature, or music, Romanticism has it all!

SB: And it feels like it's maybe even more timely or more relevant at the moment. Because it's about the idea of escaping industrialisation and going back to nature...

PP: Yes. I think there's Romanticism in that sense. Not the stupid sense of just love or romance, that's a stupid thing...

SB: "Love is a stupid thing", that's gonna be the title of the interview...

PP: <laughs> No, I meant thinking about Romanticism as only something that has to do with romance and love. Cause Romanticism is carnage. It's about the end of everything - the end of life, the finiteness. It's not just about love feelings but also terror in its most direct way. About suicide, about not accepting the finiteness, about death, about the end, about the death of God. And then what do we have? Just life. So we have this melancholic, carpe diem kind of emblem, cause there's nothing out there. That's why I feel so terrified and also very attracted to the idea of dusk as the end of the day or night as death. But there is also a perpetuum mobile, everything repeating day after day. So there is something there about the cyclical nature of life and death and life and death and life...

Sometimes I try to go through humour because I want to exorcise the idea of finiteness and death. So when I find myself really melancholic I see myself compelled to try to look at things in a more humorous, playful way instead of being terrified. <laughs> So I'm trying to use celestial bodies impersonated as cartoons as a way of curing grief.

Paco Pomet | Infinite Sadness, 2018 | Detail

SB: When you say "celestial bodies impersonated as cartoons", do you have continuing character traits for each of them?

PP: No, no. They can represent different attitudes or different states of mind. Humorous, grief, and sadness, can be reversed and change places. Sometimes I represented the sun as a curious one that appears from behind a peak of a mountain, and maybe a moon running or a moon surprised. I don't want to give a static role so we can say, "the moon is sad and the sun is happy". This is in fact a stereotype but it doesn’t work like this.

Sometimes I find myself like a vampire in my everyday life. Sometimes I hate the light in the middle of the day and I'm waiting for the night to come. <laughs>. I find myself in a vampiric state. I don't know why it happens, but it happens to me that the central light of noon in summer feels oppressive. And other times I feel really enthusiastic in the middle of the day. That's why I am interested in these themes because, in a way, I'm a victim of the light.

SB: Do you have any ideas where this oscillation of the way you feel might be coming from?

PP: I feel really sensitive to these changes because they always remind me of the passage of time. I might be working at the studio with natural light and when clouds come and cover the sun, the light fades down in the studio. And I find myself changing the humour. I've always been very sensitive to these things. I would like to be less sensitive because sometimes I suffer. So I try to fight against this melancholic character in my painting, I try to conjure it with humour.

SB: Well, I think you would go crazy here in Holland because, for example, since we started talking, it went from dark to rainy, and now it's bright and sunny...

PP: Yeah, I don't think I would be very happy there <laughs>. 

What I really enjoy about the Spanish landscape, even though it can be crude and harsh, is the steadiness - if you get up on a sunny day, you will have a sunny day. If you get up on a cloudy day, you will have it for the rest of the day. That's something that makes me more stable.

SB: Speaking of living in Spain, Andalusia, Granada, do you feel like that part could be directly influencing your work with the mountains and the scenery? 

PP: It could be in the way that I really like snowed mountains and we have Sierra Nevada here. I really like going hiking there with my kids and their friends and all the parents. But although it can be an influence, I don't think it's a definite or very important one because I change from one matter or one subject to another in painting. But definitely, I think having the Sierra Nevada could be an influence in some of my landscapes, but not in general.

SB: I was always thinking that is the case, especially after visiting your studio and getting to know the surroundings a little bit. I think the general idea of Spain is one of a sunny place, especially Andalusia, but this particular little corner where you live has different extremes together.

PP: Yeah, Granada in that way is a unique place in Spain. We have the highest mountains in the peninsula, snowed half of the year, some parts are like a desert, and not far from there you can find yourself in a dense forest.

Paco Pomet | Pocket Sunrise, 2018 | Detail

SB: Exactly, so I was thinking about how that connects with the way you're creating these contrasts in your work. I always thought that there is some connection with the contrasts from your surrounding...

PP: Hmmm it's interesting what you're saying. I never thought that this could be an influence. But now that you are seeing it from the outside, I think you're right. I mean, it's a very special place cause it's as if you are making a puzzle of different parts of Spain and the north of Africa. I like that observation.

SB: Yeah, it kind of made sense to me. Even in the technical aspect, you have this love for cartoons but your painterly technique, the actual paint application and manipulation feels strongly influenced by traditional painting. What's your favourite part of being a painter?

PP: It's difficult to say this because it is a paradoxical thing, but I'm glad I'm a painter living now, nowadays. It's paradoxical because I've never lived in another era, but if I was a Romantic painter, I would have only a few influences or references. But living in the world we are living in today, with the Internet and the abundance of information and visuals, this provides an amazing source of material that I can use. 

And also, I'm not going to say that oil paint is the best way of doing things, but there is no other material that can offer a variety of techniques. Being in the studio with oil paints, sometimes acrylics, and also chalk or crayons, but especially oil paint, makes me think I can do whatever I want. 

SB: Do you think this could be a result of your artistic education?

PP: I'm glad I had a very classical education in art school because I can be realistic if I want, or I can be more expressionistic if I want. And I think it's very important to learn the techniques and try to learn classical painting in an academic way. That's something that you can use if you want or not, but you have the ability or that background. And that for me is very important because I really like things I relate to. 

I like to see how the world unfolds and I like to see reflections and I like to see objects and shadows and I want to be able to represent that in the way I want. Even though I'm not hyperrealistic because I would really get bored. Don't get me wrong, I admire hyperrealistic painters, but I would get bored cause I don't want so much detail and I don't have the patience. But in the end, I'm glad and I'm satisfied with what I learned.

SB: I always saw your work as a full spectrum of techniques - on one end are cartoons and on another expressive painterly approach. But there's also everything in between, which contributes to how impactful the image is. In the end, some of the elements are almost sculpted with shadows and light accents added to them. How important is it for you for the work to be experienced on that level? 

PP: For me, this is very important. It has been suggested to me that I could manipulate images through Photoshop instead of painting them, but that's nonsensical to me. I wouldn't be enjoying the way of putting oil or putting pigment with a medium on a surface. The pleasure of applying paint on a surface is something that is timeless. 

It's like when you are cooking and then you are mixing things. There is a sort of fashion on Instagram now where people mix paint, squeeze things, melt them, and stuff like that. And it's all about the material. I mean, I've always thought that a good definition of art would be - turning matter into spirit.

SB: Oh yes, I like that definition...

PP: Yeah, you take something that is dead, that is just texture or just a matter, and then you turn into the spirit, into something that is alive inside, in our heads.

Paco Pomet | Little Dusk, 2017 | Detail

SB: Do you find living in times with such an abundance of inputs overwhelming sometimes?

PP: Yes. It's so overwhelming that it's just difficult to know whether a painting is working properly or not. Because in other centuries the academic restrictions would tell you, "this is wrong" or "this is right," and now it's impossible. 

It is also a question of personal preference but in that sense, the egos judge too much as we don't have a good reference point. Sometimes it is impossible to start expressing something, either in literature or in painting, without a reference point. Because nothing comes from nothing. Everything comes from previous things. And the absolute ocean of references makes us lose that reference point. And that sometimes makes you feel restless, and anxiety arises. “Please give me a supporting point and I will build the world,” I don't know who said that, but I read it somewhere.

SB: Well, I must say I'm thankful there's no reference point in this case because of the way you're building images and the weird, exciting mixtures happening with photography, classical, traditional, digital, graphic, and cartoon elements. And I find it beautiful!

PP: Thank you very much. There is a lust for life in the way I try to work. And that is something that can lead you from one corner to the other. But I'm really interested in incorporating a big spectrum of ideas or matters because everything is interesting to me. Everything. Even futile things or things that apparently are not important. 

For me, it's like listening to a child. A child can express many nonsensical things, but it's their things and you have to listen to them. I think it is very important to listen to them because they know how to play more than adults and they have to carry on playing. Play is a very important term.

SB: Do you feel like you're playing in your practice, in your work?

PP: Yes. And the more I play, the more fun I have, and the more I like my paintings. But sometimes I'm very critical of my work. When I go back and see paintings from earlier years, I think I could have done better. And sometimes I think I haven't played enough. 

So yeah, I still am in search and I think there is never enough. That is also a part of my character - I am never satisfied and I keep looking for more. This is a really difficult thing and can be very, very distressing.

SB: Sadly, I think it's an essential character trait for an artist...

Paco Pomet: Yes, sometimes I can be very demanding of myself when I'm working. I understand that can be an engine, a big engine that keeps running. But as long as you're on the path of searching, you are alive artistically. This is essential. And when you think you have arrived, you're dead.

SB: Definitely. Speaking to other artists in the past I often got a similar sentiment of this continuous search and continuous and unsettling feeling...

PP: Artists are alone for hours and we are trying to say something that is original or belongs to our vision. And if that vision can be really understood by the viewer and shared, I feel satisfied. I mean, I feel happy. It doesn't mean that the viewer has to think the same that I'm thinking, but if there is no communication, if it cannot make you feel anything, then I failed. 

SB: And looking at this particular body of work, do you have ideas of continuing, and are you excited to continue?

PP: No, I don't. I think I shouldn't try to squeeze more from the subject. It's not a question of restraining myself, I just don't want to find myself painting ANOTHER one. But in my studio, I do have another one in progress <laughs>...