Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs, I have something to tell you about Robert Combas that will shake your frozen certainties and your definitive judgments on contemporary art. Yes, this casual and brilliant painter whom you look down on from your conceptual ivory tower deserves your full attention. Because Combas embodies what Nietzsche referred to as the “Dionysian force” – this raw creative power that breaks frames and conventions to let a primitive and essential truth burst forth.
Look at his canvases that literally overflow with energy, these bustling compositions where every square inch vibrates with an almost electric intensity. Figures intertwine in a frenetic dance, bodies twist and metamorphose, garish colors clash unapologetically. It is the triumph of Dionysus over Apollo, the victory of instinct over cold reason. Combas does not seek to please refined aesthetes – he paints as he breathes, with a vital urgency that disregards the dictates of “good taste.”
This telluric force permeating his work is not just a stylistic effect. It draws from the deepest sources of our humanity, where art and life merge into one. Nietzsche saw in the Dionysian the expression of a tragic wisdom, one that affirms life in its entirety by embracing both joy and suffering. This is exactly what Combas does when he paints his bloody battle scenes alongside his couples in love, his grimacing monsters near his bright flowers.
The comparison with the German philosopher is not coincidental. Like him, Combas rejects the false pretenses of bourgeois culture to recover a primitive authenticity. His nervous line, crude colors, and distorted figures – all contribute to a single quest for raw truth. There is a shaman in him, as Michel Onfray aptly noted. A modern shaman who uses his brushes like others used their drums to enter a trance and access revelatory visions.
Take his painting “Earth Soldiers Against Space Monsters” from 1983. At first glance, one might see nothing but a chaotic and childlike composition. But look closer: it is a true cosmogony unfolding before your eyes, a mythological confrontation between earthly and celestial forces. Bodies intertwine in a violent choreography, weapons become phallic extensions, blood flows in decorative volutes. All the tension between the life drive and the death drive dear to Nietzsche is expressed here in a pictorial language of astonishing inventiveness.
This philosophical dimension of his work is paired with a keen awareness of social and political issues. Coming from a working-class background, Combas has never renounced his origins. On the contrary, he has made it a driving force for creation. His popular characters, his references to rock culture, his texts filled with intentional spelling mistakes – all constitute a form of joyful resistance to the dominant culture. He blows up artistic hierarchies as Nietzsche dynamited philosophical systems.
The omnipresent sexuality in his work partakes in this same Dionysian energy. No puritanism here with Combas: bodies display themselves, copulate, transform with jubilant freedom. It is the expression of a primitive vital force, the very one that our civilization is bent on repressing. The giant phalluses and gaping vulvas scattered throughout his canvases are not mere provocations – they celebrate the generative power of life in its rawest and truest form.
His treatment of mythology is particularly revealing. When he tackles the Trojan War or biblical stories, it is not to sugarcoat them but to rediscover their original violence. His ancient heroes possess the same brutal energy as his rockers, his saints the same sensuality as his prostitutes. He reactivates these foundational stories by connecting them to our present, just as Nietzsche reread the Greek tragedies to draw current wisdom from them.
Music plays a crucial role in this creative alchemy. Combas is a compulsive collector of vinyl records, an enlightened lover of rock. This passion is not anecdotal: it directly feeds his pictorial work. The frenetic rhythm of his compositions, their chromatic variations, their repetitive motifs – all breathe music. He paints like others improvise on the saxophone, in a state close to the creative trance beloved by the disciples of Dionysus.
His river-like titles, these delirious texts that accompany his works, participate in the same creative intoxication. They are not mere legends but prose poems that extend and amplify the painting. Combas mixes slang with scholarly references, puns with philosophical meditations, exactly as his canvases blend popular culture with great myths of humanity.
Time passing seems to have no hold on this creative energy. At over sixty, Combas continues to paint with the same urgency as at the beginning. His latest works have lost none of their primitive force. On the contrary, they seem to have gained density, depth, without ever sacrificing their original vitality. This is characteristic of true Dionysian artists: they do not age, they mature.
This maturation is particularly evident in his way of treating pictorial space. If his early works favored an “all-over” composition where figures piled up in joyful chaos, his recent paintings create breathing spaces, calm areas that make the explosions of energy even more striking. It is as if Dionysus has learned to measure his effects without losing any power.
His relationship with color has also evolved. The garish tones of his beginnings have given way to a more subtle palette, without falling into precious refinement. His blood reds now converse with acid greens, his sunny yellows combine with deep violets. But this technical sophistication always serves the primal energy, never becoming an end in itself.
The line, on the other hand, retains all its primitive nerviness. Combas draws as he always has, with a quick and confident gesture that captures the essence of movement. His figures seem to be caught in the moment, as if they are in perpetual metamorphosis. This is the hallmark of great expressionists, this ability to make life pulse beneath the surface of the canvas.
His relationship with Geneviève, his partner for over thirty years, runs through all his recent work like a red thread. He paints her ceaselessly, transforms her into a goddess, a muse, a flower-woman, but always with a tenderness that does not exclude the most direct sensuality. It is Dionysian love in all its splendor, the kind that unites body and spirit in the same celebration of life.
Institutions have taken time to recognize the value of his work. Too brutal, too direct, too “popular” for the gatekeepers of contemporary art. But gradually, the force of his oeuvre has asserted itself. The major retrospective devoted to him by the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon in 2012 marked a turning point. More than 600 works that proved, if it was even necessary, the coherence and richness of his journey.
Today, Combas stands as a living classic, without losing any of his capacity to surprise and shock. His prices soar at auctions, collectors fight over him, yet he continues to paint as if nothing had changed, in his studio in Ivry-sur-Seine transformed into a Dionysian den. The walls are covered with ongoing canvases, the floor littered with paint tubes, the air saturated with cigarette smoke and rock’n’roll.
It is here that he pursues his work as a modern shaman, transforming the chaos of the world into dazzling visions. For that’s precisely what it is: Combas is a seer, in the sense that Rimbaud understood it. He does not reproduce reality, he transfigures it through the prism of his unleashed imagination. Each of his canvases is an open window onto a parallel universe where the laws of physics and morality are suspended.
This total freedom he allows himself is not anarchy. Behind the apparent disorder of his compositions lies a consummate mastery of the pictorial medium. Combas knows his classics, he has digested all of art history to better free himself from it. His references range from Romanesque art to Picasso, from Byzantine icons to underground comics, but everything is fused in the crucible of his unique personality.
His relationship with time is particularly interesting. In his canvases, past and present ceaselessly telescopes. An ancient warrior can coexist with a punk, a Madonna and Child can find themselves at a rock concert. This temporal confusion is not gratuitous: it expresses a cyclical vision of time, very close to Nietzsche’s conception of the eternal return.
Humor, omnipresent in his work, is not a mere aside either. It is a philosophical weapon, a way to defuse the deadly seriousness of dominant contemporary art. His visual puns, playful subversions, irreverent parodies participate in a strategy of resistance through laughter. A Dionysian laugh, of course, that celebrates life even in its most grotesque aspects.
The musical dimension of his work has further intensified in recent years with the creation of Los Sans Pattes, his experimental rock band. This is not a mere aside from his painting work but its natural extension. When he steps on stage with his guitar, Combas continues to create images, but this time in sounds and movements. It is always the same Dionysian energy expressing itself, in another form.
His relationship with writing also deserves attention. The texts accompanying his works are not mere comments but complete creations in their own right, prose poems that extend and amplify the painting. Here too, it is Dionysus guiding his pen, in a joyful massacre of syntax and spelling that liberates unsuspected verbal energies.
The question of style, so important in contemporary art, is completely secondary for him. Or rather, his style is precisely this absence of style, this ability to switch from one register to another without transition, to blend the sublime and the grotesque, the tragic and the comic. This is the hallmark of great Dionysian creators: they transcend traditional aesthetic categories.
Critics who see him merely as a representative of Free Figuration overlook the essential. Certainly, he participated in this movement in the 1980s, but his work far exceeds this historical framework. It is more accurate to see him as a total artist, a polymorphic creator who uses all available means to express his vision of the world.
The future will tell if French institutions will finally recognize the importance of his work fully. In the meantime, Combas continues his path, indifferent to trends and judgments. He paints because he cannot do otherwise, driven by this force that makes him one of the most authentic artists of our time. The snobs can sneer: history will prove them wrong, as always.
