Clear statement

Vítor Pomar has been a prominent figure in the Portuguese art context since the 1970s. His conceptual approach bears the influence of Buddhism, specifically Buddhist meditation and the spiritual at large. Although rooted in the medium of painting, the work of Vítor Pomar brings together a multitude of artistic approaches, crossing painting with the experience of drawing, photography, and film. Thus, the conceptual unity of his work is continuously questioned by the diversity of media, language, and the works’ materiality, which are in permanent flux.

His work emerges from reuniting seemingly dispersed experience inscribe in daily life, which through a diary-like method, based on fragmentation, observation, and creation of images, captures the artist’s interest in the conceptualization of ideas connected with the subject of absolute existence. Sexuality is a reoccurring theme in Pomar’s work. His perception of sex and its representation throughout his practice is perceived through the prism of performative art, and as such, becomes an act of staging, rather an act of voyeurism. Pomar’s engagement with the subject in his work is tied closely to sexuality with spiritualism. Rather than an end in itself, sex in Japanese Zen is a means, among others, of achieving ones potential within his/ her spiritual path. By the immediacy of his pictorial gesture and the filter of reality constituted by his photographs, Pomar questions our relation, understanding, and experience of time, place, and being.