Robert COMBAS (Né en 1957 à Lyon) Lot n° 48

WITHOUT TITLE-1985 Acrylic on canvas Signed and dated on the back: 1985 231 x 166 cm (frame included) Catherine Millet summarizes very well how to situate Combas, and the Free Figuration, of which he wanted to be the leader, in relation to contemporary Italian and German painting trends. "This art, which claims to despise the noble references of the history of painting, is as far from the expressionist nostalgia of the Germans and the chemical conception of the Italians as it is from the cult of the avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s for some great figures of the modernist tradition." Catherine Millet, "Robert Combas. L'enfance de l'art", in Combas, cat. exp. page 33, Roger Pailhas (dir.), Marseille, ARCA, nov-déc 1984, Marseille, ARCA, 1984. In 1999, Thierry Laurent wrote about Free Figuration, these words that summarize well this current of which Robert Combas is the main actor: "Free Figuration ignores any aesthetic of the idea. It gives to''see'' and not to''conceive''. It is only "painting", "mimesis", a distorting and ironic image, unfit to reveal any truth, other than through the screen of a perception alienated from a mass schematism [...]. Free Figuration is a phantasmagoria. It is anti-discourse, aesthetic from visual pleasure to overdose. But by this spontaneity - dramatized like an overkill -, this absolute rage to assert herself, it seduces with the charm of childish mythomania. (10) [...] The Free Figuration must be observed for what it is and not for what it does not claim to be. It is only an aesthetic of the Kantian taste which can be analysed so simply in terms of "common sense", pure pleasure, both subjective and universally communicable without the help of any concept", this "universally shared" taste deriving its foundation from "this need for universal communication, which seems to come from an original pact dictated by humanity itself". Thierry Laurent, La figuration libre Paris-New-York, Paris, Au Même T