drawing now 2020

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.

Jill Gallieni is as discreet and mysterious as are the prayers she lays on paper. Indeed, these prayers can only be addressed to the saints they invoke, for they are intentionally rendered unreadable. Cryptic writing par excellence, where absence is made visible, her work plunges us into a deep anchorite universe. For more than 10 years, the gallery has represented this French artist, whose works are as well part of major European collections of art brut such as that of the Museum of Modern Art (Pompidou), the Museum of LaM (France), of art brut in Lausanne (Switzerland) or even of the Hannah Rieger collection (Austria).

Adolf Wölfli is the emblematic figure of 20th century art brut, author of more than 1,500 drawings and of a 25,000-page biography. He has built a personal and complex universe, where he reinvents his past and projects a utopian future, colonized to the edge of space. The richness and excess of this work cause vertigo. The list of artists he fascinates is long (among them Jean Dubuffet, Annette Messager, Arnulf Rainer), and an echo to his presence in the collections of the Musée National d’Art Moderne (France), Prinzhorn collection (Germany), and the LaM (France). As André Breton pointed out, this is “one of the three or four major works of the 20th century.”

A member of the Yamanami workshop (Shiga, Japan) since 2015, Momoko Nakagawa has been doing, in a broad and regular gesture, a serial and calibrated work on writing, moving from the undulating of colored frequencies to stamping numbers in coffee halos. Evoking lyrical abstraction, the young artist’s work “combines gestural spontaneity, calligraphic elegance, serialized repetition, and formal inventiveness,” as Raphael Koenig writes in the dossier devoted to her by Artpress (2020). Her work was exhibited for the first time in 2019 at Harvard University, and then, that same year, at the gallery as part of the choral exhibition japon brut: la lune, le soleil, yamanami. In 2019, Momoko Nakagawa receives the Art Absolument Award for Outsider Art.

Ever since he was a child, Carlos Giraldo has been feverishly recording his syncretic visions in drawings that combine Egyptian antiquity with anatomical treatises, the prophecies of Nostradamus with pre-Columbian civilisations, or World War II and the Simpsons. That’s when he’s not busy listing precise and detailed data about the Titanic. In Bogota, where he lives in an apartment with his parents, this Asperger’s sufferer is busy with his encyclopaedic task. Setting down his treatises on sheets of tracing paper or fine paper which he sometimes assembles into codexes, Giraldo is giving form not to one, but to myriad individual mythologies, each more fascinating than the next.