Pepe Gaitán — Epiphany — Christian berst art brut — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 9 → October 11, 2014

The gallery exhibits José (Pepe) Gaitán’s drawings, discovered this year in Columbia while the Cuban Misleidys Castillo’s paintings are presented in the cabinet of curiosities.

Pepe Gaitán comes from a bourgeois family. His father died when he was very young. His mother is still alive, and has him over every Saturday for breakfast so that he can read her the newspaper. Pepe pursued his studies in social communication and was particularly interested in radio. In 1975, he heard the curious expression “Don’t eat so many sweets if you don’t want to catch amoebas", which marked a turning point in his life. It was after this moment that he began his work. His creative process is focused on texts. He spends his days in libraries, meticulously selects pages, inspired as much by the content as by the forms created by the sentences. He photocopies them and then adds to them by crossing out letters in which he seeks out the forms of amoebas, which he calls pseudopods, then draws or glues on the images that the movement of the text brings to his mind. He always uses a very particular chromatic range. The echoes of forms that recall a codification give these works a striking geometric force. He lives alone today in Bogota and draws constantly.