Chema Cobo

Chema Cobo - Black out

Technique: Pastel on paper

Artist Biography: Chema Cobo (Tarifa, Cadiz, 1952 - Malaga, 2023) is a fundamental painter to understand the history of Spanish contemporary art. In his beginnings he was related to the New Madrid Figurative . In his early 70's he approached painting in a playful way, in the 80's, resorting to the rhetoric of "the sublime" and baroque allegory, he theatrically staged the relationship between culture and memory. From the early 80's onwards, he moved away from the assumptions of his beginnings and connected with international movements such as Neo-Expressionism and Transvanguardia. Cobo insists that he starts from conceptual assumptions and channels them through painting. His work is intense and extensive, which is why it is advisable to delimit it by stages. In each one of them he approaches his work using very diverse stylistic resources. He is a painter who seems equally attracted by the verbal and the visual. It is not in vain that the starting point of his works are always thoughts or written phrases and part of his work is reflected in his books of Aphorisms (Amnesia I and II). In the early nineties, the Joker acts as the master of ceremonies of an anonymous farce, presenting the work in a manner reminiscent, in a way, of Max Ernst's Loplop, revealing the artifice of the paintings. The words allow Cobo to go even further, confronting the verbal elements with the visual ones, and his current concerns focus on the crisis of both the image and its representation. The key point is that Cobo is caught in a dialectic between two realities: one inside the canvas (encoded as illusion) and one outside the canvas (encoded as reality). What he argues is that both are encoded: there is no simple access to an uncoded reality, since our perceptual and receptive nature is involved in all representations, pictorial or not. In that space between fictions there is something else that has interested Cobo for forty years: uncertainty and doubt. Cobo's singularity lies in the combination of two tendencies, that of conceptual art that plays with the nature of representation and that of figurative painting that concentrates on playing with what is represented. His investigation of representation revolves around the elusive nature of metaphysics, which becomes the conceptual subject of an orthodox painting... only in appearance. His work is part of museums and public collections such as the CAAC Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo (Seville), the Los Bragales Collection (Santander), Kunstmuseum (Bern, Switzerland), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, USA), MNCARS Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid) or Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, USA).