Yann Leto at the studio in Rome (2024)
Leto’s emotionally charged, collage-like paintings fuse the grandeur of classical art with the chaos of contemporary visual culture, forming a hybrid language of critique and liberation.
Yann Leto (b. 1979, Bordeaux, France) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work probes the contradictions of contemporary society through a dense visual lexicon that merges classical iconography with modern-day media culture. Currently living and working in Rome, Leto was a resident at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome from 2015 to 2016, and has since developed an internationally recognized practice that spans painting, installation, and visual research.
At the core of Leto’s work is a rigorous sociopolitical critique, approached with a deliberately ironic and anarchic lens. His paintings are constructed as complex visual collages, blending typographic elements, media imagery, digital archives, and art historical references—from Romanticism to Francis Bacon. Inspired equally by 1990s underground culture, American and French comics, and German post-war expressionism, Leto assembles densely layered compositions that explore themes of public spectacle, private trauma, and collective unrest.
Drawing from an ever-growing personal archive—comprising hard drives of digital files, news clippings, internet memes, and social media imagery—Leto creates surreal, emotionally charged worlds. These narrative spaces are inhabited by fluid, ungoverned figures who embody the psychological and political turbulence of contemporary life. Sports, television, and the absurdities of online culture often appear as entry points into broader reflections on power, identity, and social decay.
Despite the heavy thematic material, Leto’s use of color, humor, and punk-inflected aesthetics injects levity and immediacy into the work. His technique embraces formal hybridity and rejects traditional representational boundaries, resulting in paintings that are simultaneously historical and futuristic, chaotic and precise.
Recent exhibitions include La Arteria (Badajoz, 2022), Fundación Unicaja (Málaga, 2021), Aragón Park (Madrid, 2021), Festival Mar de Música (Cartagena, 2021), Galeria Yusto / Giner (2022), Boxthings (Zaragoza, 2020), ARCO Madrid (with Galería T20, 2019), Cabin LA (La Brea Studio Residency, 2019), and A01 Gallery (Naples, 2019).
Leto’s work is held in numerous public and private collections of international prestige, including MoMA San Francisco, Beth DeWoody Collection, Fondazione Benetton, Collezione Sergio Ramos, Fundación DKV, CAC Málaga, Fundación Mardel, Fundación Unicaja, Fundación Olor Visual, Luis Adelantado, Collezione Montparnasse, Avelino Marín, Marquez Art Project, Real Academia Española en Roma, Parlamento de La Rioja, and DGA Zaragoza.