Chema Cobo at Fernando Alcolea - Barcelona, Spain

Art in America, March, 1993 by Kim Bradley

Chema Cobo's offbeat paintings of the last few years meld text and images to yield vexing riddles. The 41-year-old artist from Tarifa, Spain, first attracted attention in the |70s as a member of a group of Madrid-based figurative painters influenced by British Pop art. Cobo's subsequent paintings utilized symbolic imagery rendered in a dramatic, neo-Expressionist style. His more recent canvases and watercolors are brightly colored and smoothly painted works that combine an idiosyncratic iconography - jokers, chameleons, keyholes, brick walls, eyeballs and skulls - with the artist's own verbal tongue-twisters. These phrases, written in a fractured English, also serve as the works' titles.

Cobo's range of concerns includes geopolitics, the fickle nature of truth and the shifty role of the artist. Interpreting these paintings proves an almost impossible game, and this is precisely where Cobo's brilliance lies. His principal figure, the joker, is a kind of stand-in for the artist, appearing in so many roles that his character can never really be defined. Does he represent an irritating buffoon? Or is he someone who uses humor as a protective device, shielding his true feelings while dazzling us with wit? Sometimes the joker appears relatively harmless. At other times, with his maniacal grin and lunatic gaze, and with his goofy forked hat transformed into the inverted shapes of the African and South American continents, he seems to stand for terrifying and irrational forces.

Cobo believes that things are never what they appear to be, and his compositional devices emphasize duality and reversal. images within his paintings are often presented in pairs, one stacked on its inverted partner. Individual lefters or whole words and phrases are spelled out in reverse. Phrases and images trail off the edges of the paintings only to finish up on the opposite side.

The translucency of the watercolor medium is especially suited to Cobo's overlapping images and texts. In the work shown in this exhibition, the colors, shading and pictorial style often recall British 19th-century children's-book illustrations. Recollections of childhood innocence seem to serve here as a foil for Cobo's pessimistic messages. In one picture a cute Humpty Dumpty totters along a row of eggs stretching into infinity. He holds a fat, spiked club in each hand and balances an enormous golden egg on his head. A shadowy figure on the egg turns out to be a whale, with the South American and African continents forming its tail. An unfinished phrase written in capital letters and suspended in the air alludes to a "drunken state"'s dream of a new world order. Cobo's ingenious paintings are well worth the slow study they require.