Combas - The Autistic in the Forest of Flowers

Robert Combas is a contemporary French visual artist and painter, born in 1957 in Lyon. While conceptual art dominated French artistic production, he went against the mainstream and sought to redefine the use of space, color and figuration, bringing a new figurative painting to the dawn of the 80s. Present on the art scene since 1979, he is the creator of the movement that Ben called "LA FIGURATION LIBRE", bringing together Rémi Blanchard, François Boisrond and Hervé Di Rosa.

In his works he praises eroticism, sexual fantasies, but also self-portraits, still lifes, bestiaries, winks to Velazquez, Cézanne, David or Van Gogh, scenes from the Bible, the Iliad and the Odyssey revised and corrected.

The Autistic Man in the Forest of Flowers (1991)

"The Sad Fool loves life but he is autistic and can only converse with his forest of flowers of which he is the king. His subjects honor him and decorate him with their petals of all colors and their illuminated perfumes shoot cannonballs of luxuriant odor. The Sad Fool is in paradise but he is autistic when will he be able to find life again which is gradually disappearing. He knows that he is on the right track. Already the lunar earth has disappeared to make way for all the flowers of mental creation. How much longer will he wait without being able to speak, sing or laugh. Already, he has deleted winter and autumn from his cervical calendar." (Robert Combas)

"This long canvas (216 X 518 cm) shows a man like a flower in a forest of flowers. We know that petals, pistils, sepals, stamens name different parts of the same thing: a sex. Who has never thought, while plunging their gaze into the corolla and calyx of an orchid for example, of the mysterious entrance to a woman's opening and the promises of travel induced? The original Garden of Eden in which the head of this sad madman emerges is composed of an orgy of female sexes. Exploding colors, luxuriant odors, illuminated perfumes, this canvas is felt and heard as much as it is seen. The artist is less autistic than a magic flower obeying the injunctions of the cosmos. The shaman becomes tiger and flower, snake and rock, mist and wind, silence and color - here, Combas blossoms into a flower among the flowers, like a heady simulacrum, a rain of atoms or a volley of particles moving through the air like a musical note crosses space, detached from the music of the spheres. The shaman is like a flower in a field of flowers. Or like a star in a cosmos. Or like a wolf in a pack, a bee in a hive. Because he takes on all the possible costumes of reality. Like the artist. Like Combas. From then on, our artist can become a sad madman, a perfumed autistic, the subject of a king of petals, brainless of the cervical calendar, exiled from the lunar earth, a singer without a voice, a closed-mouthed laugher, mute in expectation of nothing, the noise of the cosmos passes through him – he borrows the voice he has on stage." (Michel Onfray)