A work by Léonard Combier is like a riddle that can never quite be solved. Something always slips your notice, resisting every attempt to unravel its clues, and each piece becomes a world unto itself.

Born in 1990, Combier is a self-taught artist who has been drawing frenetically since he could first hold a pencil. He first gained attention for a series of drawings made on passports, playful interrogations of authority and administrative identity, before turning fully to painting. After 35 years in Paris, he now lives and works in Cape Town, working with Posca pens on paper and canvas. His compositions catch the eye first with their joie de vivre, a bright, acidic palette drawn from a vast collection of felt-tip pens, before pulling the viewer in with their extraordinary detail: interlocking shapes, texts transcribed in full, and geometric faces that shift and multiply.

Robert Combas comes to mind as a forerunner, alongside the graphic satire of Topor and Reiser, all three populating elaborate backgrounds with real and imaginary figures. But where Combas anchors his stories in titles, Combier's narratives stay entirely within the frame: each work is a chain reaction in which every detail interlocks with the next, leaving no room for error. The result is a kind of combinatorial art, governed by its own laws, societies and inventions, held together, ultimately, by humour: the artist's only answer to a world where everything interrelates and freedom seems impossible.

Combier's work has been shown across France and Europe, and presented at art fairs including Art Paris, Drawing Now, Art Monte Carlo, Art Antwerp, Art Genève and AKAA. He was exhibited at the Halle Saint Pierre in Paris in June 2022, and his work will be shown at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy in April.