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COMBAS Robert
Born in may 1957 Robert COMBAS spent his youth in Sete in the south of France. Since1980 he is ling and working in Paris.
The Image in Robert Combas' s works is the instrument, and Robert Combas wieids it Io 'provokee, that is, to trigger a reaction in the spectator only to "invite" him, beckoning himin and whisperinq in his ear "comeover and talk to me, I want to tellyou about the stupidity, violence, beauty, love, hatred, seriousness and fun, the logic and senselessness that pervade our day-to-day lives".
The Image, in Robert Combas' works, cannot, therefore, remain motionless, as a matter of fact, it could quite accurately be likened to a labyrinth, as the spectator's eye, starting from a particular element in the pictorial space-that which appears most obviously, is then ledon to meet successively all the microcosmic elements which make up the macrocosm of the painting, this oundiess, constantly open space created by the artist. For the artistic language daes not stop et the borders of the inner self. Quite the opposite, in fact, it only surges f rom the inner self to expand that self and reach out towards the social world. That language is a positive attitude, insofar as, beyond the crude scenes of violence or sexuality on the rampage, beyond the blending of words-or sentences-with images, Robert Combas' work is first and foremost an attitude. Not a didactic one, since it does not have the "l" as its epicentre, but, rather, a resolute attempt to expand its very field of action, far beyond the limits of the self-contained, circular rhetoric of Art history, striving to include elements thus far held in contempt by the alite who had ruled the art worid during the seventies, elements such as drawings made by children or madmen, comics, rock music, etc. The "childish" element in it is only the result of a strategy, that of a painter who decided to push back the limits of this capacity for action together with those of his image world. This is what Robert Combas' work is ail about: turning an artist's behavior, involved in a process of constant metamorphosis, into an attitude which involves not only an artistic stand, but a social one as well. In other words, a critical stand.
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