pareidolie

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.

He is the most widely exhibited and published living art brut artist, yet the extraordinary trajectory of this Frenchman raises a question that is rarely addressed: that of the impermanence of art brut. Discovered by Jean Dubuffet at a time when he was working on the resurgence of the symbolic body, he allowed himself to become the protean artist we know and who, in his creation, embodies absolute freedom. His work can be found in countless collections, and he was the first artist brut to enter the collections of the Musée national d’art moderne (Pompidou). Exhibited at the Monnaie de Paris, the Albertina Museum and the Mona, Michel Nedjar has been the subject of nine monographic exhibitions.

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.