Chema Cobo :    Out of the blue.    Read   Article about the Out of the Blue series

Actually when I first thought about this series of paintings, I was trying to find an apparently neutral image to talk about, in terms of painting, the ambiguity of ways of approaching image itself. 

My paintings, in general, are all about the search for a special distance....
I wanted to attract the eye of the viewer to a distance where the vision itself enters a kind of crisis: not knowing exactly whether the eye is really inside the pool or in the fiction of the pool, the viewer feels attracted to an unreachable deepness. The image chosen is a fragment that will never be a complete fragment and a totality that will never be a complete totality. It is a piece of something that does not allow you to see it as a fragment; neither it allows you to see it as a totality.

The image has been chosen at a point where you don't know if you are in front of a painting or in front of a painting that represents something. The viewer is balanced between the option of feeling himself in front of a painting that is flat and opaque or finding himself in front of something represented that is transparent, illusory...
The image of the pool is cut in a way to invite you to take a position and when you fall into this temptation and try to go into it, you fail, you think you can get through it but you crash on the surface of the illusion. The viewer is balancing, unable to decide if he is in front of an illusion or an object. The image provokes the illusion but at the same time it breaks it down. Just like desire, it stirs you, but in the moment you think you have caught it, it always escapes from your hand, from your eyes, and keeps you seeking.... the desire arises from an unreachable object....that's why desire will never be fulfilled... the image is a piece of image looking for somebody to complete it. 

Just take the experience of the image of the pool, take the picture of it a little further, the image looks like a swimming pool, like a fiction... if you look at the picture just a little closer you can just see a detail... the picture is taken in this time-space, moment-place where the image appears to have left the totality of the object to which it belongs to and it still is not the fragment of it... this is the ambiguity.


The painting is entitled Out of the blue, it sounds like a miracle, something like a gift that everybody deserves.