Robert Combas

Biography of Robert Combas

Robert Combas was born in Lyon on May 25, 1957, but grew up in Hérault, in Sète. Coming from a working-class family of six children, young Combas opted for drawing and painting from a very young age.
Initially enrolled at the Fine Arts School of Sète, he continued his education in Montpellier. Liberated, during his last three years of study, he found the style that would become his own, so characteristic.

Graduating in 1979, he quickly exhibited first in Saint-Etienne for "Après le Classicisme," then in Nice, with Hervé Di Rosa, at Ben's in 1981, and finally in Paris in 1984 with the famous exhibition "5/5 Figuration Libre France/USA".
In five years, Robert Combas went from being a recent graduate to being a leading artist of the new pictorial movement everyone is talking about: Figuration Libre. A sparkling journey for a funny, quirky artist, with the accent of his childhood in the south.

"Figuration Libre" was born from the rock culture, comics, and advertising of the young French painters who compose it. Although it can be related to American graffiti artists, as well as to the Germans of the "Nouveaux Fauves" or the Italians of the "Transavanguardia", the group of "Figuration Libre" (Combas, the Di Rosa brothers, or Blanchard) has a unique characteristic: their humor.
This almost childlike detachment that leads them to a painting detached from any intellectual support is unique in the history of art. For France, which has long rationalized art, creative space, "Figuration Libre" is an infinite space of freedom and a UFO in the landscape and artistic history.

Combas, who describes part of his art as "Arab Pop Art," thus referring to the fake Arabic writings that adorn his works and, for the "Pop Art" side, to the repeated nods to the visual culture of advertisements from African countries, is a brilliant troublemaker who, in thirty years of career, has opened many paths without ever accompanying his approach with anything other than passion.

From the first "Battles" canvases to the digressions on "Adam and Eve," from the references to childhood, omnipresent, to the tributes to Art Brut, Combas has reinvented himself over the years, with the same sincerity of the moment, the same colorful enthusiasm, and this detachment, this twentieth degree, which make him an eternally surprising painter.

(c) Natacha PELLETIER for PASSION ESTAMPES