Robert Combas

ROBERT COMBAS (Lyon, 1957).
Untitled.
Oil on canvas.
Signed on the right side.
Measurements: 150 x 93 cm; 162 x 106 cm (frame).

We seem to see a gang of gangsters with guns in this frenetic multicolored display, a horror vacui resolved with thick black strokes that configures a sort of lysergic stained glass window, starring underworld types caricatured to the maximum. It is a painting characteristic of the style of Robert Combas, affiliated to the Free Figuration movement. This was defined by the author himself as: "a painting that does not deny its primitive instincts nor its desire for culture". It sinks its roots in Fauvism and expressionism and traces a common thread with the neo-expressionist movement and the art of graffiti, flagging itself against minimalism and conceptual art. The combination of thick lines and bright colors brings to mind Art Brut and the CoBrA group, but also the language of Keith Haring, underground culture and comics.

French painter and sculptor, Robert Combas was trained at the School of Fine Arts in the city of Sete, in the southeast of France, and had his first solo exhibition in 1980. He is considered the co-founding father of free figuration, a movement that began in Paris in 1980 as a reaction to the minimalism and conceptual art that were becoming established in the French capital at the time. Therefore, Combas' works become a critique of society in general, through an intense style, based on the use of powerful, vivid and passionate colors that leave no centimeter of the canvas free, outlining in black the figures he represents. Other founding members of the Figuration Libre movement include Rémy Blanchard, François Boisrond and Hervé Di Rosa. Combas exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York with Keith Haring in 1983. Subsequently his work has been the subject of numerous retrospectives, both in France and abroad: ARCA in Marseille (1984), CAPC in Bordeaux, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1987), Taipei Museum of Fine Arts in Taiwan (1990), Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1993), Musée Paul-Valéry in Sète (2000), Seoul Museum of Art, in Seoul (2006 ), Fondation Mudima in Milan (2009), MAC in Lyon (2012) and Grimaldi Forum in Monaco (2016). The artist currently lives and works in Paris since 1981.