Yann Leto

Biography

Yann Leto (b. 1979, Bordeaux, France) lives and works in Madrid, Spain. He has exhibited with galleries in London, Los Angeles, Naples and Zaragoza and lived in Rome having received a scholarship to attend the Royal Spanish Academy (2015-2016).

Leto recently had his first solo show at The Cabin LA in Los Angeles. Leto is essentially a painter who is free of orthodoxy, so that his messages continually transpire between the installations, creating a language in which hybridization is the key. In an expansive work, boundaries pose as an inconvenience to be eliminated, and thus the iconoclasm and the critique uphold pieces like the controversial ‘Congress Topless’ that drew attention at ARCO 2014.

The use of irony does not trivialize socio-political criticism. His dense painting produces images that are conceived as a collage in which the typographical elements coexist with an intense revision of the great classical paintings, where the void of no-paint planes dissipates from the image.

This collage arises from a body of research that compels him to accumulate hard drives saturated with digital files, Google images, press clippings and articles. Regarding this archive –almost sickening– a ‘no rules’ approach of the protagonists is developed, a visual emotional cycle that repositions the human being in a society marked by its restlessness.