Yann Leto
Title: Starring, 2024
Rarity: Unique
Size: 60 x 40 cm
Materials: Oil on aluminium panel
Medium: Painting
Name: Yann Leto
Nationality: French
b. 1979
Yann Leto was born in Bordeaux and has resided in Spain for a decade excluding the period 2015-16, when he lived and worked in Rome owing to the Scholarship of the Royal Spanish Academy. He is now living and working between Roma and Madrid.
He made various residency program like The Cabin in Los Angeles, Al Jallo in Lanzarote and adhesivo contemporary in Mexico in 2023.
Yann Leto is essentially a painter who is free of orthodoxy, so that his messages continually transpire between the installations, creating a language in which hybridisation 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 trivialise sociopolitical 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 dissipate 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.