Jorge R. Pombo

ARTIST BOOK
192 pages, 46€
Actar, barcelona, 2007
ISBN 978-84-96954-29-8 (English)

This book bears witness to the intensive search for forms and sensations carried out by the young painter from Barcelona, Jorge R. Pombo, from 1998 to the present day. Written and compiled from a selection of dated notes (presumably from a more complete diary) organised into the various chapters into which the book is divided (Intro, Windows, White, Variations in painting, Istanbul and Cities), the book also includes pictorial and photographic works of those places visited with intensity by Pombo, and where he has known how to appreciate the profundity, the texture and the luminosity proper to an aesthetic gaze.

The series Intro, Windows and White all contain the same visual sensation and verve in a complementary style. They are all the result of trips made by the author to Greenland, and his life with the Inuit, or of his vision of the Nordic landscape (distant and untouchable) which could be seen through the window of the moving train. Pombo demonstrates the same desire to cover himself with the paint from his works, to breathe the smell of his paintings or to create form from the fluid marks on his canvases, as he does to capture the bitter chill and silence of the Nordic ice fields, the enormous weight, floating and ephemeral, of an iceberg –which acquires a contradictorily architectural character in his superimposed paintings. The same technique, of fluid forms, which Rothko or the impressionists studied so hard, is used by Pombo in his series of variations on the works of Velázquez and Caravaggio. From this arise the links which the author establishes between Titian and Shirago, Vermeer and Pollock, Lotto and Richter, or Tintoreto and Rothko.

The two last parts of the book contain a body of monographic works on Istanbul, a city which he visited without any firm intentions but which has become an important part of his work. And finally, once again making use of the technique of superimposition inspired by photography, he presents, among others, the Salehard/Düsseldorf, Brussels/Barcelona, and Sarajevo/Milan paintings.

In conclusion, the book provides the reader with an excellent opportunity to follow the progress of this poetic and thoughtful painter.

Eduardo Z. Sarmiento