TARGETING THE ARTS 2015
Nevertheless, his ongoing interest with the Femen group seems rooted in a shared outlook he says he wishes to further explore. It first came to light with a bold tribute to the women’s militancy, a massive collage along the Canal Saint Martin for the 14 July national celebrations of 2013.
The wheat-paste, brushed and breast-dominated transformation of ‘Liberty Leading the People’ by Eugène Delacroix is one of Combo’s most audacious works. “I want to denounce the discrimination and other misogynistic behavior that women still suffer too often and to pay a tribute to the activists’ fight,” he told the Huffington Post at the time. “I want to work with femininity,” he explains to me 18 months later. “These women have become friends, I admire them, they take far more risks than I do. They are true revolutionaries, they take their ideals to an extreme, while I only ask questions, I have no answers, I’m just a painter. We’ve become good friends.” Whilst Combo pays homage to Femen’s commitment, he also acknowledges a more prosaic engagement and resilience of his own, a necessity if he hopes to survive as a street artist. “It’s exhausting, exhausting. You’re out in the street all night. People take real risks and put their private lives on the line. You lose your friends, don’t go out, invest all your money in what you believe. If you have a day job, it’s almost impossible. But this city gives you the adrenaline to transgress and resist. And there are no CCTV cameras on every corner here, so street artists from elsewhere are coming to us more and more.” Hence, the appearance on Paris walls of artists like the Australian Vexta, Alexis Diaz from Puerto Rico and French American Sowat.
Dancing on a fault line Combo’s guerrilla communication, or culture jamming as he prefers to call it, finds its inspiration in the French philosopher Roland Barthes. Barthes’ 1980 book La Chambre Claire: Note sur la photographie delves in the pleasure or emotion of the observer, provoked by photographs taken as far back as 1852. They are not composed classically but follow a more instinctive path: “A photo is surprising when you do not know why it has been taken,” writes Barthes. “A photo is subversive when it is thoughtful and not frightening.” Combo says he uses this notion to “deform the primary object by super-imposing another approach.” “I take an image and I penetrate it with an original idea.” In this way he hopes to subvert and divert mainstream media culture and its institutions, by using the very tools they are built on. His “subvertising” embraces well-known icons of the mass media and the entertainment world to
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