Eric Lacombe

Eric Lacombe (born 1968 in Lyon, France) is a digital artist, graphic designer and self-taught painter whose work is focused on melancholy intended as a negative and yet unavoidable feeling that is often accompanied by fear, anxiety and sadness. Eric’s work investigates the idea of the most hidden away corners of the human mind, surrounded by depictions and the change of appearances of the human body in the context of a plain, simple metaphysical scenery. Eric’s works are characterized by a well-thought-out juxtaposition of figurative elements and expressionistic brushstrokes. Lacombe invites the viewers of his work to come up with their own interpretations of the work. Deconstructing the subjects that he produces he highlights their three dimensional properties. He uses acrylics, paper, oil, pens, paper mixed up with glue and acrylic, and various other techniques and materials. Eric’s paintings can be found in many private collections, and have been included in many group and solo exhibitions. He currently lives and works in Lyon, France.

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Eric Lacombe’s subjects are neither personifications nor metaphors of death, like the cranium in Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette by Van Gogh; in that painting, death is seen as a more sort of practice.. Neither is death merely represented as the sum of effects on a human body, as one finds in Andrea Mantegna’s Lamentation of Christ. Eric Lacombe’s aesthetic dissection of death and the consciousness of it, is perhaps best compared to James Hopkins’ Brink. Here, “a chair that seems about to fall is held in place by gravity, poised on two legs which the artist has positioned to a seemingly impossible point of equilibrium.” One can also look at Lacombe’s thickly-painted self-portraits and hybrid bird-headed creatures to see they are neither alive nor dead, but rather suspended in a kind of mental fourth dimension. The perception of imminent death affects both their state of consciousness and their level of self-awareness. Leaving them at the state of the in between life and death, to further be still and in complete silence. But as we all know there is a certain bird that represents death which is the crow, which Eric emphasizes in some of his paintings.

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Eric Lacombe fits this gallery perfectly because of what he paints. He paints portraits of people with no eyes and no mouths giving the feelings of mourning and the silence people take when there is a death. Death to him is just plainly stillness using mutated bodies of human and hybrid/ imaginary creatures with dark colors. He said that, “A monster is not always a killer, but life is definitely a monster.” Distinguishing his monsters means being part of denied destiny, when the lack of space and balance are just a taste of richness illuminated by signs. Intimately there is nothing more magical than an disruptive good and or evil feeling, like a bad dream.  Animals and skeletons dancing without symphony, looking for a definite glow. Lacombe wants to project ourselves in a rebel space of shadows and figures full of tension, but at the same time give us the light of the doubt. The worst contrast of color is the mourning of the meaning. Lacombe has no characters, no masks, but humanity that breathes pain between the pleasure of being. We are not talking about portraits but of representations of hidden identities.

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Entitled “The Weight of Silence”, his 20 new paintings and sculptures in the show are the artist’s interpretation of death, and the implications of silence in connection to death. Playing to the mysterious quality of his characters, Lacombe’s protagonists in these works are neither alive nor dead but somewhere in between. “I love the quiet drama the living exude whenever they are asleep, or tired of life, or even dead,” he says. “Imagine the very moment before death when life slips away and something new begins: this moment is truly precious, because everything is silent.”