Nicknamed 'little Picasso', this 10-year-old boy sells his works for several thousand dollars

Andres Valencia is a young boy unlike any other. At only 10 years old, the Californian is a painter who has already made a name for himself in the industry. Some of his works even sell for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Crédit : Elliott Jerome Brown/ New York Times

It was at the age of 4 that Andres Valencia began to to draw . A passion was born. Since then, the young boy has not stopped drawing, painting paintings that we feel inspired by Picasso. The 'little Picasso' is his nickname. But there is “the prodigy” too.

Very concentrated, Andres Valencia could reproduce a work, such as that of the American contemporary artist RETNA, client of his lawyer father, when he was younger. ' I brought him paper and he sat there trying to copy it. It took him two years », explains his father, Guadalupe Valencia for The New York Times .

One thing leading to another, the child sold his works. First to members of his family who bought it for him for twenty dollars. But it was under the impetus of New York gallery owner Bernie Chase that the paintings of Andres Valencia experienced a new boom.

Paintings that sell like hotcakes, up to $230,000

Credit: AFP

Bernie Chase once offered to buy one of his paintings for $100. The boy went one better by offering $5,000, which the gallery owner accepted. However, his mother, Elsa Valencia, did not see the offer very favorably. Bernie Chase then bought other paintings to make “ share [the talent of Andres Valencia] with the world “, in his words to the American media.

Thanks to Bernie Chase's network, an art gallery manager from Miami, Nick Korniloff, organized a major contemporary art fair in 2021 in the city of Florida. Exhibited to a wider audience, the paintings of Andres Valencia quickly found takers among wealthy buyers, such as a certain Jordan Belfort, whose story was adapted to the cinema in The wolf of Wall Street .

Credit: AFP

The business was launched for the young boy and some of his works sold for between 50,000 and 125,000 dollars (the sums in euros are almost identical) during an exhibition at the Chase Contemporary gallery in New York last June. These are 35 paintings by Andres Valencia who have found buyers. One of the paintings was even sold for 230,000 euros a month later in Capri, Italy, during a charity event.

If some experts see it as a lucrative business or a ' speculative frenzy Around the age of Andres Valencia, his parents assure that their son leads a perfectly normal life. ' For us, as parents, the most important thing is that he likes what he does ».

Credit: AFP