Michel Delgado: Romantic Rebel

Seraphin Gallery is thrilled to open our exhibition season with Michel Delgado: Romantic Rebel. The show will span from September 23 - November 6, 2016, with a public opening on Friday, September 23, from 6 - 8 PM. This event will mark Delgado's inaugural solo exhibition with Seraphin Gallery.

Michel Delgado is the Romantic Rebel. A true artist, his breath and pursuit are fundamentally intertwined; they both exude a perspicacious passion for truth, the contemplative search into spirituality, and a bold exploration into the austere awareness of the human condition. Delgado draws from a well of personal life experiences that compound to express a visual representation of knowing and feeling: what is kept and what recedes into bygones. An untrained, therefore Outsider, artist and by definition a revolutionary, he has ignored the traditional practices of fine art and the confinements of art history in order to perform his requisite practice. Delgado intuitively surpasses the physical world into a field where metaphysical consciousness organically seeps out of primitive visual appearance.

The artist's canvases brim with symbolic features; nothing is misplaced or fortuitous. Although Delgado begins without composition in mind, allowing the figures and forms to become known to him, this journey of painting fathers sincere embodiments and leaves only the paramount. Sketched figures and numbers appear in the depths of his depictions-- ghostly apparitions of the past and the constant rhythmic beats of life. These elements are revived from his upbringing in Dakar, Senegal, in West Africa-- where instead of musical scores, children are taught drumming by numerical memorizations. His inventions encourage genuine responses from the viewer: soliciting the dissolve of pretense, the confession of personal evolution, and the realization of continued innocence.
Delgado's decades of virtuosity has led to inevitable differences in the tone of his works, either as a result of process or concept. Selections from his White Series, Colorful Series, and The Gum Spotting Experience, are featured in this exhibition-- portraying a wide range from this artist's oeuvre.

The artist's work is part of the public collections of the Freeman Contemporary Collection, the Plains Art Museum, the American Visionary Art Museum, and the Gaurichon Collection in Paris, France. In 2014, his work was featured in the Fox Television Network series Empire, alongside works by Kehinde Wiley. Recently he delivered a lecture, hosted by InLiquid, on his work in conjunction with the Philadelphia Museum of Art's exhibition, Creative Africa.