LEOPOLDO POMES BE EXHIBITED IN THE ART GALLERY FERNÁNDEZ-BRASO A SELECTION OF HIS PHOTOGRAPHS MOST REPRESENTATIVE ALONG WITH PREVIOUSLY UNPUBLISHED MATERIAL, IN THE FRAMEWORK OF THE INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY FESTIVAL PHOTOESPAÑA 2012
June 5 – July 14, 2012
Leopoldo Pomes (Barcelona, 1931) is considered one of the photographers and publicists spain's most important and influential of the second half of the XX century. Released in 1955 in an exhibition held in the Galleries Layetanas, one of the art rooms most avant-garde of the Barcelona of those years. The gallery -which previously had artists such as antoni Tàpies - exposed to a set of photos of Leopoldo Pomes that made a big impression at that time, because is it away from the idealized vision and curator of the city and the Catalan society.
It describes with great accuracy Eduardo Mendoza in the catalog of his latest exhibition in Madrid, which took place in the Circle of Fine Arts in 2001. Mendoza says that in the photographs of Pomes "there was nothing fanciful or sentimental. But it doesn't cost very much to read behind every landscape in a world of hardship and behind every face a fate ungrateful". Will be present at the exhibition of the gallery Fernández-Braso these images, as well as a selection of photos of the theme of bullfighting, which was commissioned in 1956 and that they were to illustrate a book of Hemingway on the same topic and that due to the death of the writer commissioned editorial could not be carried out. Even so, these images were rescued in 1995 by Manuel Falces and exposed in the Andalusian Center of Photography.
The end of the decade of the fifties are also famous portraits of personalities of the contemporary art of the time, such as Chillida, Saura, Brossa, Tàpies. Portraits that link to that would be years after a major celebrities such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Julio Cortázar, and that they have become with the passage of years, the icons of those writers. At the end of the fifties, and motivated by the difficulty of giving continuity to that way of working with the photo, Pomes has to reinvent itself and decides to take the leap into advertising, a fact that will bring a career stability and will allow you to devote himself entirely to the photographic medium. Born here a new way of creating for the author, producing mostly the images in the study and providing them with a strong component of plastic and aesthetic, creating works delicate some times and convincing others, but always elegant and suggestive.
This type of work will dominate the following decades, with a series of very important dedicated to women and to advertising in general, and will be using the female body as a means to highlight the qualities of other objects and as an end in itself, as a being endowed with beauty, sensitivity and expressiveness. In the decades of the 70's, 80's and 90's, Leopoldo Pomes, as part of the Study, Pomes, will design and make what is now considered to be true milestones in advertising, as are the campaigns that are made to Freixenet and for the group, Terry, as well as its contribution in the large sports events, such as were the design and implementation of the opening ceremony of the World cup 82 and the design of communication strategy to aspire to the Olympic Games of Barcelona 92.
Since the 90s, and was already freed of certain advertising commitments, Pomes back out to the street to photograph their most immediate environment. In this new stage we can guess a state of absolute freedom, giving more importance to the expressive capacity of the color, and taking the photograph of approaches plastics themselves from other artistic disciplines such as painting. They are works direct responsive approaches very impulsive, pictures, brimming with vitality and strength, tenderness and delicacy, own Leopoldo Pomes. The exhibition of the gallery Fernández-Braso will bring together a selection of works of these periods, as well as unpublished photographs and never-before-exposed of the file's author, and that will be a novelty in this next edition of PHotoEspaña 2012.