I’ve been away a lot lately. When I visited CAC Malaga in December I saw Tarifa artist, Chema Cobo’s exhibition. It was a great place to be introduced to his work; the old market hall’s massive white-walled rooms create the calmness you need to contemplate his mystifying images.
Amongst my initial impressions was that of the distinct element of the uncanny in Cobo’s work – a theme that clearly runs through Anthony Boswell’s drawings. In Anthony’s drawings of interiors you get the feeling that what you are seeing is intimately familiar to you yet somehow unrecognisable as somewhere you’ve actually been. It’s like a memory you can’t quite place. I had the very same feeling viewing some of Cobo’s paintings.
The following text is taken from the CAC Malaga website:
Chema Cobo’s exhibition ‘is serene in appearance yet full of illusion, tension, hidden messages, secret codes, juggling acts and satire…“Out of Frame” is a selection of 33 artworks done in the last ten years. In them, we find a Chema Cobo who wants to free his work from anything distracting; it is the viewer who must be able and astute enough to discover that things are not what they seem. We are therefore faced with a series of works where order and sense will be provided by visitors themselves…one of Chema Cobo’s main objectives was to free his work from colour and any other superfluous element, thus making it more mystifying, sophisticated and intellectual. For him, grey tones and luminosity allow us to get to the essence of things; the “Technicolor” of daily life makes everything frivolous; it gives us a vision of reality devoid of nuance.’
Cobo certainly achieves his goal of forcing the viewer to “discover” meanings and messages in his work; my friends and I all read narratives peculiar to us in the different works we saw. To one person a certain painting conjured maybe one, two or a myriad of ideas, emotions, scenes and moments, to another the same image was one big meaningless blank.
For me, a narrative only took place when I experienced the uncanny in the painting, when I feel like I’m looking at snapshot of one of my own memories or moments. I do not know if this was the same for my friends but each of us had very different ideas about which paintings evoked some kind of response and our responses widely differed too.
This brings me to wonder about the way metaphysics (if this is indeed what is at play in Cobo’s work) and memory work. Maybe one has to be a certain kind of person with a certain set of experiences committed to memory and ready to access in order to have a metaphysical connection with Cobo’s art, to make sense of what we see. Or, to stay with Freud, maybe some people are less receptive to the triggers in Cobo’s art, maybe they repress emotional, uncertain and uncanny thoughts and feelings. Maybe I’m reading too much into the whole experience and the fact is that some of his paintings just don’t work but I have to say that I found his work fascinating. My friends did not. Maybe Anthony and I will suffer the same responses (or lack of!) to our Metaphysics and Memory project and discover that what we think is a fascinating journey through the corridors of the mind to get to the essence of things is actually an elaborate exercise in the art of claptrap. I hope not!
