MUNICH.- KÖNIG BERGSON is presenting BRAND NEW PRISTINE TURMOILS, a solo exhibition by Spanish artist Paco Pomet, his first with the gallery. The show features 14 oil-on-canvas paintings, most from 2024, which use appropriated imagery as their point of departure – black-and-white photographs in particular, once deployed as guarantors of authenticity and truth.

Pomet has developed a particular approach to the distortion and exaggeration of his sources, infusing his pictures with a kind of comic grotesque reminiscent of earlier European satirists like William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier. Like these predecessors, Pomet understands the visual as a site of power and influence for the public at large. Using photographs as the basis for his ludic additions to the pictorial ground of these sources, Pomet highlights the claims to truth of the image, and more seditiously, its complicity in systems of power and domination. This is especially evident in PSSST…!, 2023, in which a cartoon hand emerges from outside the frame of a war photograph depicting a soldier in the process of kicking down a door, machine gun at the ready. The index finger of the pink, cartoon hand is tapping the soldier on the shoulder, intruding in the fiction of the scene, breaking the taboo of a self-contained, autonomous image. Another form this satirical intrusion takes is evidenced in the exaggerated appendages of single figures as they are stretched and pulled apart like chewing gum or puddy. In THE REFORMIST and UNTITLED, both 2024, Pomet questions the image as a transparent conveyor of truth, not by pointing to some alternate version of what is true, but by taking the given and hyperbolizing it, making it over into something entirely impossible. In BALANCE, 2024, two black-and-white figures stride in opposition directions, their legs elongated to look like stilts.

On the surface of the image are indicators that the image in fact originates as a film still, Pomet having painted the forward and reverse markers along with a pause button. The stock image is no longer merely a photograph but can, and does, emerge out of the flux of moving imagery – film, video, YouTube, etc. Seen together, the works that comprise BRAND NEW PRISTINE TURMOILS showcase the range and breadth of Pomet’s unique approach to painting, highlighting the artist’s commitment to satirize and dethrone the sovereignty of the image. Pomet’s is not a competing voice arguing for the “real” truth behind our visual culture. Instead, he makes use of the already given to puncture holes in its façade, replacing them with cartoon hands and an impossible collage of material that can only exist in the true fiction of a painting.