The tragic episode of Heracles (Hercules) and the Centaur leads to the death of its three protagonists. Despite the frenzy of the compact composition, most of the myth's narrative elements are offered to the viewers for a little recognition game: the legendary hero and his spouse Deianeira, the river, the duplicitous and tricky centaur, the rape attempt and the Hydra-poisoned arrow shot by Heracles into Nessus' breast to save his wife's honour. The subject of the encounter between Heracles and Nessus is traditionally associated with inescapable misfortune and fatality. Yet, as always in Pomar's production, the chosen topic is never an end in itself but rather a starting point, a given space to trigger a myriad of imaginative associations.

The large-scale work is made of five cut canvas attached parts, with Heracles' head depicted on the left panel, whereas Nessus and Deianeira's confrontation figures on the right, on a smaller scale, suggesting a certain distance. Despite the absence of linear perspective, the illusion is reinforced by the use of pale and white tones on the right border, recalling atmospheric perspective. The attention of the whole scene is emphasized on the bow and the arrow (wood fixed on the canvas) which occupy the central part of the assemblage and whose scale is oversized in relation to the centaur's dimensions, but almost equilibrated with Heracles' head staring at his victim with hunting, piercing duplicated eyes.

Pomar focuses on the tension and action involved, but also on the visual and sensitive potentialities offered by the myth. The work is characterised by a rich chromatic pastel and acrylic palette ranging from translucent and glowing white and beige hues to opaque black, flat patches of vivid colours, gestual paint brush strokes, schematic biomorphic shapes, overlapping white and black lines, all key components of Pomar's fusion between figurative and abstraction.



Katherine Sirois