ROBERT COMBAS PAINTINGS SAN FRANCISCO 2019
THE WOLF SCHULZ COLLECTION presented by
The Wolf Schulz Collection of Robert Combas Paintings
Robert Combas has been acknowledged and honored by many collectors and museums, and has been the subject of scores of exhibitions at home and abroad. This special collection of his paintings was formed by his American dealer in San Francisco, Wolf Schulz. After mounting Combas exhibitions in 1985 and 1990, he carefully chose these works for his private collection They are now offered for sale as a group to the next generation of passionate Combas collectors.
‘LA MENAGERIE HUMAINE’ OF ROBERT COMBAS
Audacity lives at the center of Robert Combas’ art. A Protean and visceral delight jumps out at the viewer from his distinct figurative paintings. Bright colors and bold draughtsmanship enliven the panoply of human, animal, and mythical creatures who inhabit each canvas with an energy, and often and an open sexuality, as in a new Garden of Eden.
As early as 1981 Combas’ work (and that of his fellow artists Blanchard, Boisrond and Di Rosa) was given the appellation Figuration Libre by the influential critic Ben Vautrier. This so-called ‘free expression’ was an analogue of American Pop And Graffiti art practiced by Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Kenny Scharf. In France it was Combas who seized upon the hip idioms of cartoon, punk, and graffiti-inspired imagery, and who was the leader of the new street-savvy artists who defined the movement for a European audience.
When we look, for example, at a work like Les premiers habitants de la terre.... [Cat. no. 2] what do we see? Three grotesque and primitive creatures, not at all modern. Combas calls them the seeds of humankind. Yet surrounding these grinning and bestial prototypes, is a curious border of silvery cartoonlike panels, loosely illustrating the progress and the highlights of French history. The scenes range from an erupting volcano, to the beasts of the field, to the grand cathedrals and the chateaux of kings. By using a clearly cinematic idiom (each panel has the appearance of a ‘clip’ or frame in a filmstrip) Combas illustrates the essential shorthand of pop painting which often appropriates and stylizes its subjects, in this case the usually august genre of History painting.
One of the artist’s favorite subjects is the attraction of women and men and the intimate frisson that their encounters ignite. Untitled (Woman and man with green background [Cat. no. 4] shows us Combas’ attraction for the female figure, with the body of a huge busty woman towering over her adoring lover. Combas mocks the figures’ obsession by giving the woman a goat-like head and by reducing the man to the size of a child who has to stand atop her shoes to kiss her breast. This wild parody of female form is topped off with a model of the Eiffel Tower pinned to her trailing curls. It’s as if she were the object all Frenchmen desire, but also a creature of such strength that she has appropriated the greatest of all French phallic symbols.
As Combas’ interests are varied so are his painting styles, as evidenced by his use of a singular drip technique that he developed in the late 1980s. in Triple Têtes... [Cat. no. 7] he constructs a portrait of three figures from skeins of overlapping and staggered black lines which enclose thinly brushed transparent colors laid against a white ground. This complexity imparts movement and a kinetic energy to the figures, as they appear to be continually mingling and changing their colors. There are echoes here of the great medieval tradition of vitrail (stained glass), and certainly of the art of another French master, Georges Rouault (1871-1958).
As a teen, Rouault was an apprentice with a glass maker, and later developed his signature style which employed bold black lines to partition his images, as if they were icons of leaded glass Combas here reverses the field, playing off the blacks and colors against a pristine white ground. It has a different but oddly similar effect as Rouault’s dark ground: the figures appear bathed in an ethereal light.
These brief introductory remarks are only a taste of the pleasures and sensations that await the owners of Robert Combas’ art. I leave it to them to find and enjoy the seemingly endless delights which spill from the canvases in this distinct and important collection. Looking at the canvases I am reminded of the words of the poet Wallace Stevens, who commands that we heed “the dauntless master, as he starts the human tale.”
Fred Page / Page Art Inc
San Francisco
February 2019
Combas in his studio, 1985
Combas, Wolf Schulz Gallery, San Francisco, 1990
Robert Combas, by Philippe Dagen, Paris Museés, 200
