The title of this new show by CHEMA COBO (Tarifa, Cádiz 1952) at Galeria Tomás March is an allusion to the title of his penultimate exhibit - a retrospective show of his graphic work titled “less than nothing”- Chema Cobo makes yet another tour of this spiral of meanings he normally uses so to avoid a one-way reading of his work. In Chema’s own words: “What matters most about the work, if anything matters at all, is not for it to be a target for the eyes, but rather a decoy for the glance generated and the self-generated thoughts ..like a single machine...”. In that sense, Chema Cobo’s work is full of visual tricks, full of truths that aren’t always easy to digest, exercises of style where the author winks in turns at history, naturalism, and avant-garde. Winks that turn into a call of attention on the lack of relation between reality and vision, between vision and desire, between desire and reality. - “things are neither as we see them, nor as we would like them to be”-. Out of Chema Cobo’s recent works comes the certainty of the uncertainty of our senses, the certainty of both importance and impotence of desire.

Chema Cobo, making a paradoxical use of the image-word, subverts the most deeply-rooted concepts, revealing the fragile relation between social reality and everythig that represent it. He employs lenguage in a contradictory and ironical way in order to show its connection with the falsities it has glorified, with the vulgarity and greed dragged by democracy mass culture.

Chema Cobo’s career strarted in the mid-seventies along with a generation of now well-known artists propped up by the Buades and Vandrés galleries (later Vijande gallery).
In the middle of the eighties, his work begins to be exhibited outside Spain by galleries like Zolla-Lieberman of Chicago and Stux of Boston. Later, his shows in Berna (Kunstmuseum), Roma (Il Ponte), Zurich (M.L. Wirthe), Charles Cowles (New York), Nagoya (Japón) at the Akira Ikeda Gallery, consolidated his international carrer which brougt his work to the most important museums and international collections as: the Metropolitan Museum and MOMA of New York, the Seattle Art Museum, the Carnegie Institute, Museum of Art, of Pittsburg, the Madison Art Center, The Kustmuseum of Berna, the Chase Manhattan Bank Collection, Fundación Caixa de Pensions of Barcelona, MNCARS of Madrid, ARTIUM of Vitoria, CAAC of Sevilla , etc...