Robert Combas (1957, Lyon), The Sun Watcher Who Seeks The Light With His Yellow Cat

Acrylic on canvas. 92 x 65 cm. Signed and dated lower right. Original frame.

This work is registered in the artist’s Archives and comes with a certificate of authenticity signed by Robert Combas.

Painted in 1986, this canvas by Robert Combas fully embodies the artistic maturity the painter achieved within the Figuration Libre movement, of which he was one of the pioneers.

The work immediately strikes the viewer with its chromatic explosion: fields of yellow, violet, blue, and saturated pinks cover the surface, each motif enclosed by powerful black lines that compartmentalize the image like a stained glass window. This visual energy, characteristic of Combas, gives the scene an almost electric vibration: each shape seems animated by its own life, oscillating between chaos and harmony.

The composition is organized around a diagonal axis, structured by the yellow rays of an incandescent sun that streak the canvas from side to side. Far from being mere beams of light, these rays create dramatic tension: they seem both to guide and constrain, like a superior force linking sky to earth, the unconscious to consciousness. At the bottom of the scene, a dreamlike marsh rendered in blue and violet curves evokes primordial chaos or the depths of the soul. Flying fish and hybrid creatures inhabit this space, blurring the boundary between reality and imagination.

At the center, an almost nude figure stretches its arms toward the light in a gesture of aspiration or supplication. The body, traversed by nervous lines, embodies a quest for meaning, knowledge, or even rebirth. At his side, a stylized cat-brilliant yellow with a piercing blue eye-serves as a totemic guide: both mischievous and enigmatic, it accompanies the protagonist’s ascent from troubled waters. Its fixed gaze heightens the scene’s fantastical dimension.

The black frame, adorned with abstract motifs, scribbles, and pictograms, blurs the boundary between the work and the outside world. It recalls the spontaneity of children’s drawings, art brut, and the doodled margins of a notebook, inviting the viewer to enter Combas’s teeming universe. This frame acts as a porous membrane: it protects the scene while opening it to the viewer’s imagination.

The triptych “water – human figure – light” becomes here an allegory of an intimate journey: emerging from chaos, rising toward clarity, traversing trial to reach knowledge or inner light. The sun, stylized to the extreme, is not only a source of light: it becomes an eye, a symbol of vigilance or revelation, adding to the scene’s ambiguity.

This painting condenses the spirit of Figuration Libre: radical freedom, raw energy, blending of forms and styles, humor and depth. It celebrates the vitality of the world, the complicity between the human and the fantastic, while inviting each person to dive into their own inner labyrinth to discover their light.

Robert Combas is a French painter and sculptor, born July 21, 1957, in Lyon. He is one of the founders, in 1983, of the “Figuration Libre” movement, which advocates expressive, colorful painting free from academic constraints. A graduate of the Beaux-Arts in Saint-Étienne in 1979, he draws inspiration from comics, graffiti, punk, as well as tribal and popular art.

His dense, exuberant works mix caricatured figures and handwritten texts to tackle social and political themes with humor and vigor. Exhibited internationally, his canvases are held in public collections in Paris, New York, and beyond. His style continues to evolve, and since the 2000s he has explored monumental sculpture in bronze and resin.