pascal vonlanthen
murmurations
The gallery is presenting for the first time a selection of works by Swiss artist Pascal Vonlanthen, whose creations possess a remarkable formal intensity.
Being illiterate, his fascination with typography drives him to ceaselessly copy newspaper and magazine articles within the CREAHM workshop in Fribourg (Switzerland), which he has attended since its founding in 1998. He interprets letters in his own way—sometimes inverting them—disregarding syntax entirely. Organized in waves or columns, his long lines of signs are freely punctuated with numbers and embryonic shapes.
Having grown up on a farm, Vonlanthen at times conveys a sense of pastoral nostalgia, evident in the presence of animals or in his knotted landscape sketches. More enigmatic is the appearance of small haloed homunculi reminiscent of saints. While paper remains his medium of choice, he occasionally transforms an unfolded cardboard box into a polyptych.
His script, a simulacrum of writing that he is unable to read, dances and undulates across the paper’s surface like an aerial ballet of a murmuration of birds.
Pascal Vonlanthen belongs to the great family of Art Brut, which brings together visual artist-scribes—or perhaps the reverse—such as Dan Miller, Yukio Miyashita, Harald Stoffers, Ramon Losa, and Yuichi Saito.
His works are part of major collections, including the MAMCO in Geneva and the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, which dedicated a monographic exhibition to him in 2024. That same year, presented by Lovay Fine Arts gallery, he was awarded the* Solo Prize at Art Genève - F.P. Journe.
Born in the village of Rossens in the canton of Fribourg (Switzerland) in 1957, Pascal Vonlanthen grew up on a farm in a family of seven children, which became a major source of inspiration for his early drawings, where he depicted people and animals. Due to Fragile X syndrome (a condition that causes significant cognitive impairments), Vonlanthen was unable to learn to read or write, leading to a unique relationship with language. In 2014, his interest in writing began to emerge in his works through the rewriting of newspaper headlines from the papers he encountered on his way to the CREAHM workshop. Since his work started being exhibited, his sources of inspiration have expanded to[…]