Cobalt Mister Burns Forbes Magazine

Kobalt (° 1973, France) creates mixed media artworks, media art, and mixed media artworks. Using popular themes such as family structure and culture, Kobalt often creates work that uses creative play tactics, but never permissive ones. Play is a serious matter: during play, different rules apply than in everyday life, and even everyday objects are transubstantiated.

His mixed media artworks are full of obviousness, mental inertia, cliches and jokes. They question the compulsiveness that comes from the deeper meaning and superficial aesthetic appearance of an image. By experimenting with aleatory processes, he touches on various overlapping themes and strategies. Several recurring themes can be recognized, such as the relationship to popular culture and media, working with repetition, provocation and examining the process of expectation.

His works never show the complete structure. This results in the artist easily imagining his own interpretation without being hindered by historical reality. By making daily life his subject, while commenting on the everyday aesthetics of middle-class values, he formalizes the accidental and emphasizes the conscious compositional process behind the seemingly random works. The thought processes that are supposedly private, highly subjective and unfiltered in terms of dream worlds are frequently revealed as assemblages.

His work often references pop and mass culture, using written and drawn symbols to create a world where lightheartedness reigns and rules are subverted. By parodying the mass media by transferring certain formal aspects of our contemporary society, he seeks to increase the dynamic between audience and author by objectifying emotions and exploring the duality that develops through different interpretations.

His works are characterized by the use of everyday objects in an atmosphere of bourgeois mentality in which recognition plays an important role. Kobalt currently lives and works in Paris.