collection Laurent Dumas

Deeply impacted by his discovery of Augustin Lesage, Éric Benetto explores the most arduous spiritual paths: monastic life and ascetic practices of the Orthodox hesychasm. His Chinese ink or pencil drawings, on paper, radiographs and other MRI scans are imbued with syncretic mysticism as well as an exceptional modernity. Before his first solo exhibition organized by the gallery in 2019, his work had already been noticed at the exhibition Brut Now: art brut in the time of technologies, at the Belfort museums. Since then, he has joined prestigious collections such as those of Laurent Dumas (France) or Treger-Saint Silvestre (Portugal).

This Californian artist, who died in 2010, had a degree in chemical engineering. Fascinated by meditation and metaphysics, he sought to unravel the mysteries of existence through formulas and numbers drawn from his own history. This “conceptual brut” artist sometimes photocopied his work to distribute it to as many people as possible. In 2014, Daniel Baumann introduced him to the 548 Center in New York. The following year, we entrusted Gael Charbau with writing an essay and curing the monographic exhibition held at the gallery. In the same year, Alfred
A significant number of his works was donated to the Centre Pompidou collection in 2021.

Convinced of his lycanthropy (belief in the transformation of a man into a wolf), this young Madrid-based artist draws inspiration from Kafkaesque metamorphoses in comics and mythology. His polymorphic work—drawings, sculptures, performances—urges us to embrace our repressed therianthropy (human-to-animal transformation). Represented by the gallery since 2016, his works appeared recently in Photo | Brut #2 in Brussels (2022), Portreto de la Animo at the Museo Nacional de Soares dos Reis in Porto (2023), as well as at Fundación ONCE in Madrid and Fondation Francès (2024). His creations are part of major European collections, including those of Hervé Lancelin, Laurent Dumas, and Piet Meyer.