A major painter of "Figuration libre", Robert Combas became known in the early 1980s for the imaginative force of his painting, which brings together the most contradictory worlds: the popular world of comic strips and rock culture, but also the history of art and religious traditions. In a deliberately naïve style, which flouts rules and conventions, he multiplies references, recalling American graffiti artists, Kandinsky's abstract painting as well as Chaissac's art brut. Combas' mocking tone, his sense of humour and grotesquerie quickly become his trademark.
Robert Combas (born 1957)
Compagneros catcheros ! Putain de Dios ! Edenteros ! 2001
Estimation : 30000 / 50000 €
The painting we are featuring "Compagneros catcheros ! Putain de Dios ! Edenteros !"( 2001) offers a full illustration, with these two toothless wrestlers with toothless smiles, stuck in their suits and bow tie too tight. As is often the case with Combas, the space of the canvas is saturated with colors, graffiti and words that spill over onto the frame of the work (a filling compulsion that brings it closer to Art Brut). These words, which here serve as a title, are written in a deliberately popular, slang style, with spelling approximations. Behind his satirical verve and his deliberately anti-intellectual remarks, Combas casts a cruel glance at our world. As Philippe Dagen wrote, "he seeks neither poetry nor grace. He tells of the world from which he comes and which he knows by heart. He invents its realism, as brutal and trivial as this world itself. Everything that was no longer in the art world comes back at once. The burlesque, the grotesque, the obscene reappears. »
