Cracking The Code

Discovered in the early 1980s at a homeless center in New York City, Melvin Way is now a key figure in contemporary art brut. Having interrupted his scientific studies because of his schizophrenia, he relentlessly covers fragments of papers of mathematical and chemical formulas, sibylline sketches… These dense talismanic notes, which he treasures in his pockets, exhale a rare magnetism. The 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Critics, Jerry Saltz, considers him “a mystic visionary genius, one of the greatest living American artists.” The artist’s works are now in the collections of the MoMA (New York) and the Smithsonian (Washington).

Born into the Colombian bourgeoisie, Pepe Gaitan has chosen to live a life of asceticism, the only pleasure of which comes directly from the daily reading he does in the national library in Bogotá. From these books, he selects pages that he photocopies and obliterates the counterforms. It is around these phantom graphemes that he composes his sibylline collages. In 2020, the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève honoured him in scrivere designando, an exhibition curated by Andrea Bellini and Sarah Lombardi.
Pepe disappeared at the beginning of 2022 without having completely solved the mystery of the amoebas running through the lines of his books.

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.