Salo VI

At a very young age, Marilena Pelosi began to make drawings in which exuberant Catholicism and feverish Macumba, from her native Brazil, swirled to the point of delirium. The reminiscence of trance, eucharistic processions and carnivals are inextricably combined with much more intimate evocations. Established in France for several decades, she continues these same troubling drawings, made with ballpoint pens, in which doll-women are both executioners and victims. Now part of the CNAP collection, in 2019 she will join BIC (France), and in 2021 the Musée d’art moderne (Pompidou, France) and was recently included in the collections of LaM - Lille Métropole Musée d’Art Moderne, Art Contemporain, and Art Brut in 2025 (France).

A mason by trade, Joseph Barbiero fled Mussolini’s Italy in the 1920s and settled in Auvergne, never losing the accent of his Venetian dialect. Though he never went to school, he helped restore Notre-Dame-du-Port and Clermont-Ferrand Cathedral before carving archaic figures from lava stone: faces, two-faced characters, possessed of a savoury “barbarity” that he extends in pencil on packaging cardboard. The builder of sacred edifices seems to be inventing a cathedral to his own measure.
His work is held at the LaM, the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne and, since 2021, the Centre Pompidou (Decharme donation).
In 2011, the gallery devoted the exhibition au-dessus du volcan to him.