One can understand the confusion, even discomfort, experienced by all those who encounter Pomagalski's work and try to place it among the categories of contemporary art.
The kinsfolk suggested for him, more as points of reference than as a continuous family tree, conjure up an imaginary museum, witb rooms for Velazquez, Goya, El Greco, the Romantics and, especially, Géricault. I would add Monticelli to that list for his frenzied but lucid forms, for the theatilcal parade of ambiguous scenes in wbich the characters not only inhabit the decor but seem almost to be made of the same stuff.
That said, the abstract-figurative dichotomy seems even more futile in the case of Pomagalski than it is for many other contemporary painters. Gérard Coulange identified the problem precisely when he wrote of "an artist who has taken into account all the richness of the great geniuses of the past in order to project it into the future with his own elements".
This "taking into account" is one reason for the paradoxical sensations one experiences while looking at these canvases. On the one hand there is a charge, a density, a richly evocative power which comes.from the multiplicity of sources, the weight of references, the human depth fed into the image, or rather into the highly complex weaving where the strands come alive, collide, are juxtaposed, and, finally, are brought into harmony in each composition. On the other hand, there is an imperious movement which the work as a whole arouses and which suggests analogies with gestural arts.
There is thus a contrast between the static elements which give depth to this lofty attempt to compose myths and reality, memory and creative projection, a human presence waiting, almost fixed, among the minerals and the draped landscapes in convulsion, imposed in a jumble by a particularly fertile imagination, and the dynamic force which, with an impetuous wind and uncontrollable spasms, sweeps the mental reality that cannot be reduced to a single place, moment or space.
This convergence of opposites can be explained by the tbree-stage process employed by Pomagalski: after a spontaneous first outline and the selection of the colour range, which inspires in him a sort of childish joy, the artist organises, breaks up and orders the living matter of his first draft. He finds the rhythms and the vibrations, makes something discernible emerge from the unexpressed, gives birth to characters from blotches.
If this painting is timeless, it is in the sense that it cannot be anchored in any chronology but, in its structure and its movement it is a metaphor for fleeting time, limitless space, an anywhere-anytime, as it seems to illustrate shadowy legends, sublime battles, telluric after-shocks, holy processions or crowds gathered to bear some Messiah.
the initial shock unleashed by the creative process is lost in the successive filtering and treatments but there remains the tension of life, the violence caught in an image and tamed by the artist's labour, moments rich in fertile situation.
One feels, without being able to say so categorically, that these canvases have a before and an after, but that the event they identify is an extremely slow manifestation of the movement of bodies, suns, glaciers, masses. The light is imprisoned in sombre bulks, or the ochre tones are pierced by splinters of blue, brief strident bursts of red, a chromatic alchemy of extreme richness, voluptuous austerity, painful softness. The mind obviously enriches this universe, of which one has identified some of the components but which one hesitates to attribute to a particular kingdom or order. Unless perhaps the different kingdoms are mixed together so subtly that some of the seated bodies, in tbeir fullness, are part the mineral world and one can never seperate that which belongs to the spreading vegetation from the human heap or the rocks which tumble down as if in cinematographic slow motion, as time changes gear right down to a frozen image.
This incursion away from pictural modes which Pomagalski offers us, charged with the rich cultural memory that the people from the East are often privileged to have, because they have had to wait, or learn, to savour that which we can squander, this journey into the eternity of shapes is at the same time the testimony of a painter of today.
He questions our world and his art carries our anguish and our joy, our expectations and our hopes.

GÉRARD GASSIOT-TALABOT
Art historian