ROBERT COMBAS

Combas is a master of detail. An artist well versed in the mystery of how to personify love, eroticism, melancholy and violence.
Combas thrusts his ingenious motifs before the observer‚s eye with the same explosive force as a flower erupting through the asphalt. He tells a story in pictures, narrating in his own, highly individualistic language inspired by the icons of rock music, comic strip figures and the illustrative techniques of children´s book.
His paintings possess an irrepressible momentum, a hurtling cascade of images in which the brutal battle between the matador and the bull mingles with images of butterflies, musicians and all manner of whimsical figures. His work is a tapestry of sequences in which bottle green conflates with lemon yellow, and blood red stands in stark contrast to midnight black.
The forms and themes of his production are extremely varied – from religious insights and historical perspectives to autobiographical fragments and frequent re-interpretations of rock and pop art.
His is a mosaic-like style that finds expression not merely in paintings, collages and sculptures, but equally in furniture, glass and stage costumes.
Robert Combas, who now lives and works in Paris, was born in Lyon in France in 1957. After studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Montpellier he began to develop his spontaneous ”free figuration” style of painting while he was still in his twenties. Today he is regarded as the leading figure in the artistic movement that during the 1980s evolved into what is usually called ”La Figuration Libre”.
Other artists in the group included Hervé Di Rosa, François Boisrond and Rémy Blanchard, while, on the far side of the Atlantic, Keith Haring, Johnny Mattos, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Sharf formed a quartet which experimented among much the same lines. The two groups met at the Musée d‚Art Moderne in Paris in 1984.
Combas‚ unconventional and occasionally overenthusiastic works in this style are, in his own words, a reaction against the intellectual and academic affectations of the Parisian art world in the 1970s. The new way forward that he staked out stood, above all, for the liberation of the symbol. It depicted a creative chaos, occasionally with destructive overtones, at the same time as it was pregnant with irony and shot through with rich veins of both fun and joie de vivre.
Since 1981 Combas has had solo exhibitions at venues that include the Galerie Yvon Lambert and Galerie Beaubourg in Paris, the Léo Castelli Gallery in New York and Guy Pieters Gallery in Knokke-Zoute and St Paul de Vence. He has also exhibited in a number of museums, such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Musée Toulouse Lautrec in Albi and both the Musée d´ Art Moderne and the Musée de l´Érotisme in Paris. In summer 2003 a joint exhibition of Combas‚s work was held at eight different institutions in Aix-en-Provence under the title ”Une Saison Combas”.
”Robert Combas is the most gifted French artist of his generation,” writes the French art critic Jean-Pierre Frimbois. Provocation – his strident protest against injustices both existential and political – is one of the leitmotifs through the artistic landscape of his career. Time after time he confirms the paradox that the most individual and intimate experiences have the most universal applications. And it is thus not difficult to identify with his paintings, hovering as they do between the primitive and the civilised. His interpretation of society, human suffering and human joy – the rock-and-roll of life! – is the very essence of Combas‚s work.
From doubt and belief, the eternal struggle between despondency and equanimity, he coaxes forth the world with which he chooses to confront us.
There seems to be a link, a train of thought that binds Combas inextricably to Paul Eluard, a prominent pioneer of Surrealism, who wrote of ”the spring that never runs dry, the water-hole where Beauty begs her bread.”

Johan Persson, 1 August 2004