Sète (AFP)

In the middle of a press visit, Robert Combas, the most punk of French painters, retouches with black felt-tip pen a picture painted more than 20 years ago.

Exhibited in Sète (south of France), he "sings" another enfant terrible: Georges Brassens.

At 64, Robert Combas' hair has whitened, but the master of Free Figuration, one of the most popular French people on the international contemporary art market for decades, remains a whimsical artist whose work still draws its inspiration. in comics and rock.

"Sometimes I forget to do something," he says, crunching Mickey's ears at a woman in a purple costume who figures in the center of his 2000 canvas titled "The Station Bridge (which hides another one). ) "and on display at the Paul-Valéry Museum in Sète until December 31.

Born in Lyon on May 25, 1957, this artist has his origins in Sète, where he has kept the accent.

"Robert Combas has a passionate relationship with Sète and to talk about Sète is to talk about Brassens", explains Stéphane Tarroux, director of the museum and curator of the exhibition "Robert Combas sings Sète and Georges Brassens".

This exhibition is one of the key events organized on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of the mustached singer who was born in this port city on the shores of the Mediterranean on October 22, 1921.

"They didn't know each other, there was a generation gap and Brassens died relatively young (in 1981). Combas saw Brassens only once, on a balcony. But the character accompanied him to several moments of his career ", underlines the director of the museum.

The exhibition therefore has two stars: the city of Sète itself - its bridges, its port, its famous naval jousts -, generally painted in 2000, and Brassens.

- "Irreverent" -

Canvases dating from 1992 celebrate the most famous works of the libertarian singer, "The Bad Reputation, The Gorilla, The Lovers of the public benches ...", illustrated in a falsely naive style, sometimes crude, sometimes poetic.

The painter Robert Combas at the Paul-Valéry museum in Sète on October 7, 2021 Pascal GUYOT AFP

"It seems simple but it's full of little touches of energy", underlines Combas, whose compositions are teeming with details and whose line sometimes recalls that of the American artist Keith Haring.

These works dating from about thirty years are next to portraits produced this year, especially for the centenary of the birth of the author of "L'Auvergnat".

We see a Brassens "in all its forms" - with or without a pipe, with his guitar, young or old, black or white - that Robert Combas says he wanted to make "more colorful" than usual.

"I wanted to be irreverent, otherwise it would not have worked. And this disrespect becomes respect, at least I hope", explains the artist who titled his portrait "favorite" "Forward pipe forward, if you want Brassens gives him a pipe "and whose" Gorilla "is a condensed version of lubricity.

Three of the portraits of Brassens by Combas also illustrate a luxury box set of 10 vinyls featuring all of Georges Brassens' original titles and 700 copies printed by the record company Universal.

© 2021 AFP