ROBERT COMBAS

His artistic influences

Robert Combas, painter and sculptor, is recognised as one of the pioneers of the Figuration Libre movement, a European artistic response to American neo-expressionism and a reaction against conceptual and minimalist art. Combas immersed himself in the arts from an early age, entering the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier in 1975. His works, vibrant with raw lines and bold colours, find echoes in Art Brut and the CoBrA movement, while recalling the popular graphic style of Keith Haring.

At the heart of his pictorial practice, Combas draws inspiration from popular culture, graffiti, comic strips and street art, fashioning a visual language where pop meets the personal. Alongside Rémy Blanchard, François Boisrond and Hervé Di Rosa, he laid the foundations of Figuration Libre in Paris in 1980. That same year, his first solo exhibition was held at the Galerie Errata in Montpellier.

His rise continued in the 1980s, a period during which he rubbed shoulders with artists such as Jorg Immendorf and Georg Baselitz, and exhibited in New York at the Leo Castelli gallery in 1983. Although Combas was academically trained, his style was deliberately less sophisticated and more direct, as in his paintings “Panique” and “Les Gaulois et les Romains”, works of art that transformed doodling into an art form in its own right.

Living and working in Paris, Robert Combas continues to enrich his work with references to popular culture and autobiographical traits, as demonstrated by his 2012 exhibition in Lyon, where over 300 of his canvases were on show. These works of art, often embellished with texts in street language, demonstrate an ongoing quest for visual and thematic communication.

The work of Robert Combas

The work of Robert Combas is deeply rooted in the representation of the human figure, often immersed in wild, violent or orgiastic scenes. On large canvases, often unstretched, he fills the pictorial space with a dense profusion of bodies, urban poetry and motifs reminiscent of the compulsive ornamentation of popular and outsider art. Combas creates tumultuous narratives of war, crime, sex, celebration and transgression, reflecting all the phases of the whirlwind of modern life. As we said, in recent years a strong autobiographical vein has become evident in his work, present only subliminally, if at all, in his earlier works.

Combas often seems to present his work as a critique, both of the artistic gotha and of society in general. In his recent painting ‘I am greedy man’, a dense jumble of bodies intertwines, with transparent linear figures in the foreground, monochromatic figures in the background, and two more accomplished figures in the middle, one in a business suit and the other muscular and shirtless. They dance in a whirlwind of text with no discernible beginning or end, which might read: “I am greedy man / Please shout me babe / Soul serenade is a lot of pussy / Pussy gone on the Eiffel Tower / My Eiffel Tower is long and large”. This caricature of a society in which all are anonymous, except in the individual recognition of needs and satisfactions, is typical of Combas’s work throughout his career.

Although Combas’s works often carry an element of shock or confrontation, he insists that these images are intended, above all, to engage the viewer. Their execution in bright colours and bold, free lines communicates a spirit of proletarian camaraderie that counterbalances the tendency to overwhelm, especially in the larger works.