Chema Cobo

Chema Cobo (Tarifa, Cádiz, 1952 - Málaga, 2023) is a fundamental painter for understanding the history of contemporary Spanish art. In his early days, he was associated with the New Madrid Figuration movement. In the 1970s, he approached painting playfully; in the 1980s, resorting to the rhetoric of the "sublime" and Baroque allegory, he theatrically staged the relationships between culture and memory. From the early 1980s, he moved away from the assumptions of his beginnings and connected with international movements such as Neo-Expressionism and Transavant-garde. Cobo insists that he starts from conceptual assumptions and channels them through painting.

His work is intense and extensive, so it's advisable to divide it into stages. In each phase, he approaches his work using very diverse stylistic resources. He is a painter who seems equally attracted to the verbal and the visual. Not surprisingly, the starting point for his works is always written thoughts or phrases, and part of his work is reflected in his books of Aphorisms (Amnesia I and II).

In the early 1990s, the Joker acted as the master of ceremonies for an anonymous farce, presenting the work in a manner somewhat reminiscent of Max Ernst's Loplop, revealing the artifice of the paintings. Words allowed Cobo to go even further, pitting verbal and visual elements against each other. His current concerns center 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 another 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 receiving 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, which plays with the nature of representation, and that of figurative painting, which focuses 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 Andalusian Center of Contemporary Art (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).