A moment of splendor for modern art came to Córdoba with the American Art Biennials organized in the early 1960s by IKA (Industrias Kaiser Argentina), which had already promoted the Salons of Contemporary Visual Arts. Pont Vergés, who had obtained the Guggenheim scholarship, had a decisive influence both in the Salons and in the Biennials. In 1965 he was awarded the Special Prize for Drawing at the São Paulo Biennial.
Due to the political situation in our country, in 1978 he settled in Madrid and the observation of Velázquez and other masters of European painting left a mark on his pictorial work that addressed different isms. Between the 1970s and 1980s he painted scenes with surreal and magical realist connotations.
Among them “Dressing the Dwarf” (1999) inspired by Velázquez’s portraits of buffoons, “Manet’s People” (1992), a quote from the famous “Lunch on the Grass”. He portrayed Carlos Alonso, Antonio Monteiro, Rafael Alberti, to whom he was joined by a great friendship. There are “still lifes”, for example, those of a single fruit inserted in a niche, works in which he represents himself in front of the landscape, expressionist gauchos like he had painted in his beginnings, scenes from stories and legends from his childhood.
There is a painting “A town at the time of the Angelus” (1977), a small town with low houses, desolate, a dirt road traversed by a child or a doll. A disconcerting situation, in a mysterious range of colors very much in keeping with the magical connotations of a vision of the world that he remembered from his childhood.
Upon his return from Spain in 1984, he acted as Director of Visual Arts and Director of Culture for the Province of Córdoba, becoming a great protagonist of the political and institutional function. It was not easy to pigeonhole him into an artistic trend, so he confessed it on one occasion, “I change a lot of technique from one exhibition to another, in this lies the mechanism of my creative freedom.” We remember a painting that we saw in 2000 in the art gallery of the famous ranch La Paz, “The shadow of FB” in which he managed to capture what Francis Bacon himself said about painting, “it is our own nervous system projected on the cloth”.
Pedro Pont Vergés died in November 2003, days after opening an anthological exhibition at the Museo Genaro Pérez.
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