Drawing Now 2016

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).

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). In 2023, we presented works by Marilena Pelosi at ARCO Madrid.

Living her spirituality along the paths of Qi-gong, it was at the dawn of her 40th birthday that Guo Fengyi began to reinterpret popular Chinese beliefs in ink and brush drawings. On rolls of rice paper, sometimes measuring up to 10 meters, entities unfold.
Sometimes akin to The Pantheon, sometimes to pandemonium, they seem to float in a space-time void. These heretical scrolls were exhibited at the 55thVenice Biennale, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and in 2023, during the exhibition Chrysalide : le rêve du papillon at the Center of Contemporary Art of Genève .

A typographer by training, Košek first became a fairly conventional artist. When he fell into psychosis, he began to produce works as radical as poetic. Convinced that he plays a decisive role in the sequencing of the world, he spends his time at his window, recording his observations - meteorology, bird flights, insignificant facts - and aggregating them into diagrams supposed to ward off chaos. For fifteen years and across the world, from the Palais de Tokyo to the Maison Rouge, from the MONA (Australia) to the DOX in Prague and The Rencontres d’Arles, his Sibylline maps have been constantly interrogating.

Convinced of his ability to become a wolf, this young artist from Madrid is fascinated by the Kafkaesque metamorphosis found in the world of comics and mythology. As polymorphic as he is, his work consists of drawings, sculptures and performances, and urges us to accept our own repressed gifts for shape-shifting. Promoted by the gallery since 2016, he had a major show that same year at the Biennale de l’image possible in Liège, Belgium. In 2022, his work was featured in the exhibition Photo | Brut #2 at the Botanique in Brussels. His work is now part of several major European collections of contemporary art such as those of Antoine de Galbert, or Laurent Dumas.