Victor cobo biography

Bio.
Born in 1971 to a Spanish mother and an American father, Cobo is a self-taught photographer who draws inspiration from Surrealism, Film Noir, and German.
Victor Cobo was born in 1971 to a Spanish mother and an American father.

•

Bio / CV

Victor Cobo Resume

Through his photography, Victor Cobo paints a dark, sometimes sinister world of ambiguity. At turns autobiographic and then entirely fabricated, he weaves blustery landscapes with high-contrast figurative imagery including animals, self portraits, and female subjects of adoration, awe, and dread. His lurid and playful melodramas address the primal mysteries of sex, birth, death, damnation, and salvation.

Born in 1971 to a Spanish mother and an American father, Cobo is a self-taught photographer who draws inspiration from Surrealism, Film Noir, and German Expressionism. Repeated visits to The Museo del Prado in Spain with his taxi-driving grandfather and seeing midnight thrillers in Florida with his father as a child changed his life.

Cobo writes: “When I was four years old my parents went through a torturous divorce. My father had been using all manner of drugs including heroin and was an acute alcoholic as well. The relationship had been abusive, often to the point of serious violence, and finally my mother had no ch

•

Artist Statement
My work is about dreams, love and the desire to battle loneliness and isolation from society. I want to capture the horror, emotional tension and hidden beauty that can be found in these individual exiles. Lost souls who crave ever lasting love. When someone’s life is void of this, memories and dreams are held onto the dearest. My photographs pay homage to these important moments. Memories of longing are held for safe keeping, in which there are visual contrasts between the real and the surreal. It is often this world that borders on fiction that keeps us searching for love and happiness throughout the rest of our lives.

In many ways the private universe that reveals itself in my work is my own mechanism of escape. Photography has become my therapy. I am intrigued by life's dark curiosities. Transfixed, it is a gift and an ambiguous burden of vast weight. It is what I have; what has me.

- Victor Cobo
http://www.victorcobo.com

Bio / CV
Victor Cobo was born in 1971 to a Spanish mother and an American father. His autobiographical pieces explore the shadow

•

Victor Cobo's photographs are at once brutal, terrifying, and humorous. They are a schizophrenic narrative of his daily encounters: dark snapshots, funny one-liners, and occasional soft pauses that have a raw energy unlike many other photographers today. In one photo, a grainy, brooding, unidentifiable female figure stands on the side of a road, her fists almost clenched and eyes glowing from an unseen light source. Another image depicts Victor wearing a Mexican wrestler’s mask, waving his arms jovially from the body of a shark. Cobo's ongoing body of work, which includes hundreds of these seemingly unrelated photos shot over the past decade or so, show no beginning and no end. They are pieces of a non-linear diary that take us through eerie woods, sex clubs and even lush inviting seascapes all in one blow.

While his work is not untrue to his life experience, he describes this discordance as an alternate reality, one that enacts every day occurrences on an open-ended stage. “I feel that making a photographic universe that's theatrical can open up so many interestin