Steven Watson: What an odd, three-way conversation! Two guys in New York talking about an artist across the ocean. Plus the artist--Chema--via fax.

Robert Atkins: We hold all the cards: We ask the question and we insert Chema's answers. It's not fair, of course. We very literally create the context for his words--and shape their meanings.

SW: It's the age-old story about frames and frameworks that Chema knows so well. Think of the story of his eveglass frames--the framers of his vision--over the last decade.

I had 8 more or less, 3 of them were broken by the wind in Tarifa (great!) one of them was broken when I was dancing and I move my head faster than Nietzsche.

RA: To each his own frames. Still, it's probably important to lay out our own frameworks as straightforwardly as possible. I'm an art historian and critic who writes about contemporary art from what we Americans describe as a socially-engaged perspective. Also a journalist, editor, and Web-site producer.

SW: I write not about art, but about artists, and especially the social and psychological contexts in which they make art. My books are about cultural circles of the twentieth century. I simultaneously have worked for two decades as the staff psychologist in a community mental health clinic. In one life chronicling the avant-garde, and in another life working as a civil servant. So, Robert, what most interests you in Chema's work?

RA: Its literariness. And also it visuality and its originality. By originality I mean Chema's ambitious efforts to merge left- and right-brain concerns. Faculties like the analytic and intuitive, painting and writing. And discovering dandified traces of Chema himself in the work, too. What about you?

SW: I am interested in Chema's internal map. I don't mean to attempt Freudian analysis or look for Jungian archtypes, but I am drawn to the cognitive style that informs his creations, that shape his themes. I like to see the correspondences between the child and the artist, the seed and the flower. As he puts it:

Chema boy = Cimabue.

RA: It's amazing that he can pun in three languages. We're so English-bound.

Make a Map. . . .Mapping is my way to take naps (napping).

SW: Chema's choice of maps as a metaphor seems predetermined. I grew up in a place where everything was lakes and fields. And for you it was a matter of navigating the freeways in Los Angeles. Imagine how different it was for Chema, growing up astride two continents and two oceans.

RA: Yes. Looking in one direction and seeing the Moorish fortifications of Tarifa, and looking another way and seeing Africa. And knowing that to the West were the Straits of Gibraltar. For centuries they represented the Western boundaries of civilization, the end of the known world.

Africa, that you saw from my former home in Tarifa, appear and disappear is like the words that slides on their meaning....Africa is real like a pain, like wound, bleeding Africa show me to look at....To desire and to discuss what hell is this hell of reality. Africa need us, and we need Africa, if not we will lose our need to of desire.

SW: The way Chema talks, the land is both a place and a meaning, sliding, slipping. And that describes his painting as well. The figures and motifs are identifiable and often repeated. The Jester, the globe. But their meanings keep getting elaborated. Place was loaded with reference, but it wasn't exactly about geography. It was internal--mapping the unmappable. Chema was stamped with the geographical collective unconscious of Tarifa--not to sound too Jungian--so perhaps he inherited an inclination for mapping.

RA: But his maps are conceptual. You did a kind of mapping as a psychologist.

SW: I used a different kind of map at the mental health clinic, assigning diagnostic categories to people, a statistic, calibrated down to two decimal points. Sometimes those maps were inadvertently as fanciful as Chema's maps. But utterly without irony. Irony was impossible in that system.

RA: Irony is so central to modern art and literature. We tend to forget that there have been more than one type of personality trait among modern artists. Everybody knows the tortured expressionists--beginning with Van Gogh and ending with Ab Ex-ers like Mark Rothko.

SW: It is hard to find a good model for dealing with art and psychology. On the one hand it becomes so romanticized--the tortured genius spilling his guts on canvas. And on the other hand so judgmental--using categories to pinpoint pathology, a sort of official name-calling.

RA: Yes, but far more interesting and equally relevant were another kind of artist: the dandies and flanneurs.

SW: You're thinking of Chema in the lineage of Decadents and Dadaists?

Je suis seulement un flanneur--like Baudelaire, like Alfred Jarry, like Erik Satie, like my twin the joker, like Raymond Roussel.

RA: Exactly. Those that rejected bourgeois propriety while prizing artificiality and self-consciousness. Usually that got expressed through satire, wit, intellectual skepticism.

SW: That certainly describes Chema. Those are his weapons of choice.

RA: Historically speaking, this was all a withdrawal from conventional politics of the late 19th century, which were still caught up in a kind of Victorian and paternalistic highmindedness. The art equivalent was a rejection of the idea that art should imitate nature, while being uplifting and didactic. Dandyism was an escape from industrialism and new kinds of social problems.

SW: This sort of detachment and irony perhaps reached its height in Marcel Duchamp, who your friend Moira Roth so wonderfully described as a "self-readymade." He became a virtual extension of his art.

RA: And its most powerful interpreter. Despite his notorious "silence." Chema too enmeshes his work in a context or web of words--and not just on his canvases.

I never wanted to become a writer, it's too bound up in style...I prefer to be a story teller.

SW: You mean the aphorisms?

RA: Yes and the puns, too. Chema's linguistic facility is astonishing. But I worry that Chema's verbiage is overdetermining. It clues people into his intentions but it also limits the way some people look at the work. Intention is hardly everything in art. The most famous example of intentional fallacy in postwar art might be Francis Bacon's earnest belief that what he was doing was trying to make a screaming mouth a "thing of beauty like a Monet sunset." Nobody seems to have given this viewpoint much credence.

SW: I'm glad you brought up Bacon. Like Chema he was certainly a moralist. And neither is a frivolous, dandyish lightweight.

RA: Like so many other artists of the 1950s, Bacon was part of the first generation of post-Auschwitz, post-Hiroshima artists. Frivolity was never his calling card. Nor was it for Oscar Wilde, though.

SW: For Wilde it was a mask.

RA: Exactly. He was an ironist. What seemed odd about the modernist dandy--if I might digress and distinguish this species from the postmodern one--was his singleminded interest in the individual rather than the social. In some ways it was linked to the concern for individual autonomy that would come to be known as Existentialism.

SW: Which was being simultaneously pioneered at the end of the 19th century.

RA: Yes, in Denmark by Soren Kierkegaard. But what seemed like decadent narcissism and a retreat into an antisocial, individual-centered universe, now seems like the norm for the post-collective, post-modernist condition the entire world finds itself in.

SW: So the postmodern dandy is really the postmodern moralist?

RA: Well I guess morality includes the relationships between individuals, and between individuals and social entities or institutions. Perhaps ethics is the concept I'm groping for.

But art is not a matter of beauty, it is a matter of how to be a thinking [person] in a world of idiots, how to look in a world of the blind.

SW: Are you calling Bacon a dandy?

RA: No. But like Chema he was an ironist--think of the Crucifixions especially, which are profane, rather than sacred. To be an ironist simply means to say one thing, but to mean another. Witness Duchamp or Magritte or most absurdist writers, for that matter.

SW: Chema's jokers play with an archetype predicated on irony--the cunning fool, the wise village idiot, and the like.

RA: Yes. Or consider more complex uses of irony in a painting like Blind-Watcher, which ironically decimates the sentimental vision of the all-seeing avant-gardist by pairing images of a blackened brick wall and an unfathomable map that sports half an eye. What is this about, if not limitation, reflexiveness and blindness? Chema calls irony a "critical method" and in our age of shallow, unidimensional popular culture he's absolutely right. What makes him a sort of postmodern ironist--perhaps Jasper Johns was the first--is his rejection of idealism, his interest in grappling with contemporary life in all its messiness and complexity.

Art is not an Oprah [Winfrey] show....it is the only way I have to reject vulgarity. Maybe I am becoming a dandy or starting to accept that I've been one my entire life. This is a hole. Am I looking for Alice or looking for the light?

SW: Beneath the irony is an earnest morality--the battling dichotomies.

RA: Or maybe it's not even a matter of conflict. As Susan Sontag once said about the 20th-century sensibility, it's a product of (Jewish) moral earnestness and (homosexual) aesthetic irony.

SW: The other side of irony is that of having no distance from emotion and sense. The boundary erased. One of Chema's early memories was seeing a framed poster in his father's gynecological office. It was Velasquez's Venus.

I got crazy, then I went mad about such a body, about the shape of the flesh and all the rest hidden--the breast and the 'clam'--that I would discover later on. But in my mind I retain the magic of the mirror, reflecting the face of the lady and making her something human, touchable alive...After this discovery I keep comparing the Venus with reality and I started peeping all the girls (my maids) at home. In Spain, in summer, it is hot and women dress light and they had to be on their knees, cleaning up the floor, etc. So I took advantage of the situation to see as much as I could--their breast, solid, heavy...and their legs from the back--wet like fishes and bringing such a pleasure for the nose!

RA: Sex and art tied together in smell and vision.

SW: It also raises, early on, an atmosphere of sensory overload.

RA: As in Chema's favorite expression : "Too much for the body."

SW: And in Chema's case it is a matter of sensory overload meeting intellectual speed and conceptual ambidextrousness. The result? Irony and art and playful art. Elegant conceptual circles that are mediated by the limits of word and image. Always seeking a precarious conceptual balance.

I do use my hands, right one and left one for everything. ...I can write with both of them. I paint with both of them . . .But I was quite repressed when I went to school as a child. To write with the right one how I got a kind of dyslexia.

RA: That describes the adult Chema, too. He is radically ambidextrous: marrying left and right brain functions. One way is the equivalent of another--words and images, literal and metaphorical meanings.

SW: His paintings are like the way Chema began to talk: everything is all at once.

Probably when I was one year old, I do remember myself talking with my mother. Later she told me that I started talking from one day to the next, by surprise. She also said that I talked as I do today, maybe too much, but I began with an entire vocabulary in my head and as an expert in grammar.

RA: It's certainly not the way most people begin. Has he stopped talking since then? But unlike so many talkers he's also a careful listener, a great conversationalist.

SW: Dyslectic children find out early on that they are outsiders, that they see a blackboard or a page differently than people around them. You learn to either distrust your perception, or to distrust the accepted ways of ordering things. As a child Chema was at the mercy of the classroom left-right world, and he rebelled against it. As an adult he has made that doubleness into his own language. Everything is fluid and reversible and the usual boundaries lose their meaning.

Aphorisms are the lay-out of the paintings, and painting are the aphorisms of the lay out. The difference?...I do not think in my case there's any difference between verbal and visual. Eyes can read the mouth and mouth can see the skin.

RA: He loves the duality and the dialectic. He could never be a politician or a propagandist; a simplifier. You already referred to his reveling in his senses. But that tendency is always bound up in a complex dualism that forces you to stop and think.

SW: The intellect as a balance, a counterweight, a boundary.

RA: I so like his painting of snails on barbed wire exploding in bursts of light, as if the wire were electrified. It's his addition of a second, nearly monochromatic panel with fragments of the word "silence" on it that locates the work in the realism of the senses and the intellect. It's what give the diptych its resonance.

SW: Chema regards words as constructs to plays with. Always shifting meanings, punning on sound, shifting references. He has an amazingly large interior chamber for conceptual reverberation. Everything bounces, between words and images, twinned and punned.

I do blame the word BETWEEN and prefer to BE-TWIN.

SW: Chema obliterates linear logic. As if to say--no, I'm not playing by your rules, I'm just playing, and spilling all the toys on the ground. Play as delight, as defense mechanism, as aggression, and as art. Chema's means reflect the instinct to play. It's a combination of a brilliant, ultra-fast, information-filled mind with the subversive instincts of childhood. Building up intellectual constructions like a tower of conceptual building blocks. Then elegantly destroying it by moving one piece, shifting a meaning, so that it comes crashing down. I think of Jean Vigo's Zero de Conduite.

RA: Well there's the linguistic logic--he was a longtime philosophy major.

Also I do find in my work some traces of melancholy, obsession to discuss logic in its own terrain. Let's say be the WORD. Wittgenstein is a kind of a new bible, for skeptics he's a negative way to be religious.

RA: But what about the alternative linguistic logic of dreams? I mean the puns that can be so surprising in dreams. Chema's work often underlines the blurry distinction between visual and word-based language.

In general I do not like to remember my dreams, sometimes they are more powerful than my will to amnesia. I prefer to start dreaming as soon as I wake up....But I do dream words. Are they in color?

SW: I like to think of mastery of one language as a stage of development. And as soon as he mastered that philosophical-linguistic logic, he turned to painting. But he didn't turn his back on philosophy, he just incorporated it to move on.

RA: More incorporation.

A painter friend came to my house and saw all the notes that were drawn on the walls with texts and colors. Let's say I used to write all the points that were interesting for me to remember about creating trees, structures, full of color. At the moment my friend told me about Arakawa and after that I discovered Jasper Johns and finally I found a new way to make philosophy of language....I do not like art and love it as far as I can talk about books: Walter Benjamin, Adorno, Canetti, Hannah Arendt, etc....Art is a sensuous way to make Philosophy

RA: This is a philosophy of skepticism, which is informed by its romantic zeal to remake the world. With a touch of fatalism, too.

SW: Or as Chema put it, when we asked him how it feels to be a specimen under our microscope, he faxed us a long list of "outsiders:"

It's quite simple. Like smoking in the U.S.A., being a lesbian in London, a person with AIDS in Barcelona, a black woman in the Bronx, a North African in Paris, as old-fashioned as Mick Jagger, a bad (Spanish) actor in Hollywood, a child in Ruanda or Chema Cobo at an opening.

RA: Shall we give Chema the last word here?

SW: What would that be?

To paint is quite easy, to have an idea to be painted is--believe me--quite difficult.