Hugo PONDZ

Hugo Pondz deploys an azure blue universe that awakens the viewer with great breaths of pictorial fresh air. It invites contemplation in an almost minimalist world where we project ourselves and where we breathe happily. Around the swimming pool, in New York, on the plain of a golf course or on the paths of a car park, all the paintings of Hugo Pondz are imprinted with a singular depth.

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Hugo Pondz began to paint late but art has always surrounded him. His father, an antique dealer, immersed him in this environment quite early on without him completely devoting himself to this passion. His mother, on the other hand, painted rural landscapes for pleasure. It was on a chance day that he took the plunge, taking out his box of paints. It was a groping start where he tried to find his way, mixing paint copiously and randomly. Hugo Pondz was then 16 years old, and remembers this experience as catastrophic!

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He tried again at the age of 28 when he met Jean-Pierre Hubert who introduced him for the very first time to a real pictorial technique. Hugo Pondz let himself fall into a minimalist, surreal universe, where the alchemy of colours remains of paramount importance. It is in dense and deep blues, luminous concretes, and swimming pools with calm and transparent waters, that the artist and the observer, succeed in imposing a staging that is intended to be almost minimalist, splashed with light and shadow.

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Hugo Pondz is a painter of his time, as proven by his works on the events of September 11, 2001. For him, art in the broad sense should not fulfil a purely aesthetic function and be reduced to the simple role of object or decoration, but it has a societal role which should also invite us to reflect on the events that have marked our current situation.

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Among his inspirations, we find the influence of the American painter Edward Hopper in the work of Hugo Pondz as well as that of surrealists such as the Italian Giorgio de Chirico, and his geometric and minimalist universe. With his affection for emptiness, architecture and large spaces, the artist takes up this heritage and expresses it in his own interpretation. Generally placing a character at the centre of his work, he likes to divert its role and function.