Painter-sculptor, painter-photographer, Pablo Tomek is also a painter. This is what he reminds us by extending his series of paintings made with sponges, which borrow their subjects and their techniques from working-class practices, from the white of Meudon spread on the windows of construction sites, to the practice of erasing graffiti in the public space, with a karcher. Presented "elbow to elbow, like a frieze", Tomek reminds us of his attachment to these accidental writings. So many amateur and anonymous signs of the street, of which Brassaï said: "To engrave one's name, one's love, a date, on the wall of a building, this "vandalism" would not be explained by the only need of destruction. I see it rather as the survival instinct of all those who cannot erect pyramids and cathedrals to leave their name to posterity".
Tomek explains: "Unlike my first paintings, these motifs and messages are no longer pretexts for an abstraction, but purely reproduced, and dictate the composition of the painting. These signs, which I used as intrusions in the composition of the paintings, have become the very subject of the painting. We find here the idea of the printer: Tomek continues his attempt to make painting a photograph, and photography a painting. The painter's gesture then becomes quasi-photographic, a post-produced scan of effects, of filters well-honed by the artist.
Pablo Tomek has always rejected the label of Street Art to define his work. Heard today with social networks, the mainstream press, auction houses, the movement evokes in the collective imagination a form of bad pop art, kitsch and harmless. Pablo Tomek, on the other hand, comes from graffiti, a cryptic, underhanded, risky, clandestine approach. An environment where he made his weapons by breaking the codes. But the definition of Street Art by Pierre Restany about Karel Appel could be confusing: "(Karel Appel) assimilates the "street art", the "Throw away Art", the art of the street, of the waste, of the objects that are thrown away, to a metaphorical game, to a recreation in the recreation. He is modest, because he knows that this game is the very essence of the world: this industrial object of waste, such as he "treats it after having taken it at the time of the exhaustion of its functional stage, he takes it out of the nothingness of the obsolescence to raise it to a dimension of full new expressiveness, poetic and human. It humanizes and poetizes the standard product of the machine, the worn out, consumed, thrown away, lost object: it is the return of the prodigal child".
