José Gabriel Mendoza & John Ricardo Cunningham

José Gabriel Mendoza (1936-2010) was among the last patients whose works the renowned Peruvian psychiatrist Honorio Delgado collected in the 1960s. Originally from the Callao region (Peru), this eldest of eight siblings began showing signs of acute schizophrenia at age 19, shortly after obtaining his accounting degree, which led to his institutionalization for the rest of his life. And it was there that the miracle occurred. In the protective seclusion of the asylum, encouraged by a caring and attentive Professor Delgado, he tirelessly began creating hundreds of feverish and exalted expressionist gouaches.”

John Ricardo Cunningham is one of the last patients whose works were collected by the famous psychiatrist Honorio Delgado, in Lima. Interned for 32 years, he undertook a kind of geopolitical mapping of the world where the authorities became, by metaphor, austere men with hats, birds with flapping wings or rats holding canes… His narrative but elliptical gouaches seem to make us witnesses of the state of the world. Presented for the first time in 2018 by the gallery, his work is already exhibited at the Pinacothèque d’Hervé Lancelin in Luxembourg.