Pharmakon

The Uruguayan gardener, Alexandro García, began to transcribe his ethereal visions following an encounter of the third kind - or avistamiento - that he experienced as a child. Worthy heir to magical realism, however, he goes beyond its scope: he speaks to us of an elsewhere offered to our projections and to the colonization of a new humanity through inhabited and saturated architectures. Present notably in the abcd/Bruno Decharme collection (France), his work was shown in the exhibition Elévations in 2015, co-curated by Antoine de Galbert, and tribute to the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, a fairy tale palace built by the postman Ferdinand Cheval in 1879.

Heir to the Russian aristocracy of the 19th century, this renowned biologist fell into madness at the height of his scientific career. Interned in Germany, he threw himself body and soul into the creation of thousands of pages covered in gouache, charcoal or watercolour; thus opening, like a window in his cell, an escape into an infinite universe, a metaphysical escape. His fantastic works, when they are not abstract, are populated with ghostly characters: hybrid monsters, multicoloured insects, characters with disproportionate eyes, or small beings with the appearance of mutants.
His work, which captivated Daniel Cordier and Jean Dubuffet, is represented in important collections across the world, and thanks to a gift by Cordier, is in the permanent collection of the Paris Pompidou Center.

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 covered fragments of papers of mathematical and chemical formulas, sibylline sketches… These dense talismanic notes, which he treasured in his pockets, exhaled 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).

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.