Voyage into the Essence of Painting is an exhibition that shows how this Barcelonan artist has evolved from the 1990s to the present day. Pombo’s huge paintings reveal two passions: one, inextricably linked to the art of painting; and the other, a passion for life. The artist talks about the need to express his emotions through painting in a constant journey of investigation and improvement. Discoveries that occur as a result of an ongoing interior dialogue and in the context of settings where he has spent either extended or short periods of time.
Jorge R. Pombo was born in Barcelona in 1973, although he has had broad experience with travel. Stays in Sweden and Greenland led to a period in his work characterised by snowy and cold landscapes, where nuances of white and grey show his mastery of oil painting and evoke atmospheres like those of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), for whom Pombo maintains a profound admiration.
The beginnings of his career, in the late 1990s, when he painted realistic overlapping images of landscapes and later cities—partly influenced by the German artist Gerhard Richter (1932)—demonstrate a remarkable compositional richness. Repeated experiences taking place outside his habitual environment nurtured Pombo’s creative aspirations, as he set new challenges for himself at every turn.
Trained as a designer and graphic artist, he came to painting almost by chance. Yet it became a physical and mental need for him, whose material dimension has been the key to his love for art and his dependence on it.
An extended stay in Paris and another in New York, where he lived for almost five years, in addition to visits to cities in Italy, Turkey, Mexico, the United States, Qatar, etc., contributed to the artist’s taking on new pictorial challenges in the spirit of constant improvement and with intense self-discipline. “I swing from the fullest conviction in what I’m doing to the most unbearable insecurity,” he confesses.
The evolution of his art, from a figurative style to a more abstract one, is the consequence of a constant and thoughtful personal and creative journey, although both styles converge naturally in his work. Pombo’s profound respect for art history, and specifically the history of painting, and his admiration for great masters such as Velázquez, Caravaggio, Tintoretto, Titian and Delacroix, among others, show that his relationship to painting and his creative expression are not haphazard; they are the result of in-depth meditation and experimentation.
Pombo’s pieces are the result of experiences, thoughts and practices: what he likens to “channel surfing” involving multiple factors that influence his pictorial process. As such, a number of different series have emerged since his first exhibition in Barcelona in 1998, when he was 24 years old. Maps of overlapping cities, variations on works by the great classical masters, overlapping cities, verdant landscapes and snowy scenes, are some of the chapters in his painting, which he has carried out with utter devotion and dedication. The common thread that unites them is not conceptual, rather it derives from what he defends most persistently: his interest in delving deeper into the practice of painting.
This exhibition includes large-format pieces from his most notable series, which lets us observe both the mastery of his technique in realistic paintings and his fascination with the idea of stains—understanding that they can be as exciting, or more so, than recognizable elements. We also witness Pombo’s capacity to destroy what he has painted as a way of finding himself within the pictorial process.