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Michel Delgado
Senegal. Naïve Art. Michel Delgado, a self-taught artist who grew up in
Senegal on the west coast of Africa, is considered one of the most
visionary Brut artists of our generation.
 Painting in our so-called sophisticated western culture, he chooses
to create work without using conventional representational
techniques. His work is completely free from optical mannerisms such
as perspective or a vanishing point. As other Naïve painters before
him, Delgado’s work often brings to mind images created by children,
so obviously untrammeled by academic training. It is filled with
intense and basic colors, crisply painted shapes, and meticulous
attention to detail.
Delgado’s paintings are narratives. They convey memory, time, and
history: the very ground we walk on. Woven in the fabric of the
natural world, Delgado’s fresh and direct vision reveals an
understanding of the pain and solitude of immobility and silence, as
well as joy, learning and love. Like Henri Rousseau, Jean Dubuffet,
Alfred Wallis, Grandma Moses and other Outsider artists, Delgado’s
approach can best be described as honest. His work is at all times
compassionate. And like its creator, his art is at once spiritual
and worldly. Delgado makes art that is refreshingly straightforward
and visionary, ever powerful.
Michel Delgado’s paintings have received many honors and awards
since he first began exhibiting professionally fifteen years ago. In
2004, the Artist’s work was featured in a museum exhibition at the
Miami Art Museum curated by MAM Curator, Lori Mertes. Delgado was
awarded the prestigious 2004 South Florida Cultural Consortium
Fellowship for Visual and Media Artists, where he was selected from
a field of more than 350 applicants by a national panel comprised of
experts from American arts institutions from the Art Institute of
Chicago, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Brooklyn Museum of
Art New York City, Third World Newsreel New York City, and UCLA
Hammer Museum Los Angeles.
Delgado’s commissioned paintings are in numerous prestigious private
collections worldwide; he has been chosen to participate in select
juried exhibitions throughout the United States; and his work has
been featured in scores of solo and group exhibitions. For a more
comprehensive listing of Delgado’s awards, honors, projects and
exhibitions, see the artist’s
resume. |
