Chema Cobo

Chema Cobo - Black out

Técnica: Paper on paper

Biografía del Artista: Chema Cobo (Tarifa, Cádiz, 1952 - Málaga, 2023) is a painter who is essential to understanding the history of contemporary Spanish art. In his early days, he was associated with the New Madrid Figuration. In his early days in the 1970s, he approached painting in a playful way; in the 1980s, resorting to the rhetoric of “the sublime” and to baroque allegory, he theatrically staged the relationships between culture and memory. From the early 1980s onwards, he moved away from the assumptions of his beginnings and connected with international movements such as Neo-Expressionism and Trans-Avant-garde. Cobo insists that he starts from conceptual assumptions and channels them through painting. His work is intense and extensive, so it is advisable to limit it in stages. In each of them he approaches his work making use of very diverse stylistic resources. He is a painter who seems equally attracted by the verbal and the visual. Not in vain 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 1990s, the Joker acts as the master of ceremonies of an anonymous farce, presenting the work in a way that is somewhat reminiscent of Max Ernst's Loplop, revealing the artifice of the paintings. Words allow Cobo to go even further, confronting verbal elements with visual ones. Currently, his concerns focus on the crisis of both the image and its representation. The key point is that Cobo finds himself caught in a dialectic between two realities: one within 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 unencoded reality, since our perceiving and receptive nature is implicated in all representations, whether pictorial or not. In that space between fictions there is something else that has interested Cobo for forty years: uncertainty and doubt. Cobo's uniqueness 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 theme 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 Colección Los Bragales (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).