« Free Figuration was first and foremost the freedom to paint what one wanted, as one wanted, without asking for permission. »
Painting against conceptual silence
Robert Combas grew up in Sète, studied at the École des beaux-arts de Montpellier. At the beginning of the 1980s, with Di Rosa, Blanchard and Boisrond, he launched Free Figuration: a return to narrative, comics, rock, sex and painted text, against cold abstraction and conceptualism. The canvas is saturated up to the edges. The « bad drawing » becomes a weapon.
A popular theater
Cavaliers, madonnas, sisters, musicians, battles, Christ: Combas plunders art history and mass culture. Surround your partner, The hands of my sister, Madonna, Trio of rocos from your collection are typical of this theater. He exhibited very early in Paris, New York, and Tokyo. Critics might have found him too noisy; the public and the market, no.
A work still at war, joyful
Combas continues to paint a lot, to write on canvas, to mix tenderness and grotesque. Free Figuration has entered the museums. His art asserts that painting can still tell, scream and laugh at the same time.
