Yann Leto

Born in Bordeaux, France, Yann Leto (b. 1979) has been residing in Spain for over a decade, and recently moved to Rome. In the period between 2015 and 2016 Leto lived and worked in Rome, since he was granted a Scholarship of the Royal Spanish Academy. Leto has widely exhibited throughout Europe, and actively participates in various art fairs. Following his first solo show in Los Angeles in 2019, Leto gained international recognition.

At the beginning of his career, Leto was strongly influenced by American and French comics, the underground culture of the 90s, and German expressionism of the post-war period. Exploring irony as his primary tool, Leto embraces equivocal topics and sociopolitical criticism through his distinctive and liberating painting technique. Although Leto’s paintings often convey different narratives, the portrayals of people in dynamic settings, indoors or outdoors, remain fundamentally in his imaginative worlds. Sports, television, social networks and personal experiences serve as sources of inspiration for Leto from which he draws his ironic ideas and critiques.

Leto’s creative practice can be described as unconventional. Working primarily within the medium of painting, the artist never settles for a particular representational technique, creating a visual language in which hybridity is key. In his extensive body of work, Leto ferociously banishes all limitations of artistic expression and incorporates a captivating synthesis of the poignant, the absurd and the provocative. The combination of vivid and murky colour palettes allows Leto to articulate vulnerable topics in an entertaining and compelling way, and underscores nonconformism as an essential component of his paintings.