Born in 1957
French Nationality
Artistic movement : free figuration
Number of works in the collection : 169

LISTEN TO THE CULTURAL MEDIATOR’S COMMENTARY

Mathilde accompanies you during your visit:

QUOTES FROM THE ARTIST

“My name is Robert Combas, I am, as you may already know, the leader of the free figuration in France. Without boasting, I am a very simple person. After a very unhappy childhood, I lived among the workers who work in the coal mines in the town of Sète, […] hence my Mediterranean spirit. My parents managed to pay for my studies until the end. I owe them a lot to my success, and I believe that today they are rewarded.”

“My first quality at the beginning is the subjects, I can deal with them all, that’s my difference. “

“I don’t just want to transcribe like many graffiti artists do, I also want to find creative things, to really create from there, for me, within me… I don’t always work spontaneously and sometimes I do serious subjects, even political ones, but my paintings make people laugh even when it’s horrible.”

IN THE EYES OF YVON LAMBERT

“Whereas before, visitors and collectors would enter my gallery always wondering what they would find, and also what they had to understand, now it was the shared gaiety and the communicative comedy that was displayed on my walls. During the first years of this delirious decade, I often spent my Sunday afternoons in his studio. I had the feeling that I was breathing differently, having fun watching this generation pay attention to the way they were dressed when for fifteen years, we had always had to affirm in our small art world that fashion was sister to capitalism and that we had to be detached from these considerations of appearance.”