Robert Combas

Robert Combas (born in Sète in 1957) is a French painter and a central figure of Figuration Libre, the movement that emerged in the late 1970s alongside Hervé Di Rosa, Rémi Blanchard and François Boisrond. Drawing on comic strips, rock music, popular art, punk and medieval iconography, he has developed a teeming visual vocabulary: flat expanses of vivid colour, emphatic black outlines, accumulated motifs and handwritten texts woven into the painted surface. His world brings together battle scenes, personal mythologies, sexuality, humour and social critique, carried by a deliberately ‘raw’ energy.

Spotted as early as 1981 (the exhibition Après le classicisme, ARC/Musée d’Art moderne de Paris) and internationally (the Times Square Show, then galleries across Europe and the United States), Combas set himself against the prevailing conceptual austerity, championing a ‘living’ art, narrative and popular. The 1980s brought him strong visibility in museums and galleries alike, confirmed by major retrospectives (notably at MAC Lyon in 2012). In parallel, he has collaborated with the world of music (Requins Marteaux, Les Sans Pattes) and explored sculpture, ceramics and monumental drawing, while maintaining an abundant painterly output.

His importance rests on the rehabilitation of expressive figurative painting in France, on an openly claimed porosity between high culture and mass culture, and on an instantly identifiable graphic signature that continues to nourish the contemporary scene.