Jerónimo Elespe, the challenge of small things

Madrid,

Born in Madrid in ’75, Jerónimo Elespe trained and began his career in the United States, where he graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York to later pursue the Master of Fine Arts at Yale University. After more than a decade there, in 2008, and after being uncovered by Soledad Lorenzo, returned to Spain, and since then has been working in medium and small formats, normally in oil paintings painted on aluminum panels that contain references both to classical painting (from Velázquez to Antonello de Messina) and to different aspects of modernism and contemporary painting; between one aesthetic and another it establishes a constant exchange of languages and codes.

These panels are the support for autobiographical scenes, exterior or interior landscapes, portraits and abstract night prints that he creates from memory or imagination; Precisely the intimate condition of his metal formats serves the artist to emphasize the character of his works as small physical objects, in contrast to the usual immateriality of images today.

All his works have an autobiographical starting point, in relation to the domestic sphere and the life of the creator in the studio: as his (slow) process progresses in the workshop, which can last for months or years, those autobiographical motifs They gradually acquire their own pictorial logic, in parallel to the introduction of fictional elements into the compositions; Thus, the characters most frequently portrayed by Elespe will generate something similar to a fictitious family.

Using an austere color palette based on whites, blacks and grays, which are superimposed in layers according to meticulous procedures, he has accounted (like Uslé, like Soledad Sevilla) for his hours of night work; This author seems to test everything that fits in such a small surface: these are precisely the ones that – he explains – demand more questions, time and effort from him, since large formats are faced from the start with a greater number of resources. pictorial signs that define their paths from the beginning. For similar reasons he chooses aluminum over canvas: it allows greater experimentation (not freedom of movement), it represents a discomfort in the face of which he hopes to find new techniques, sometimes with the collaboration of expert engravers.

Jerónimo Elespe. Two sounds, four nights. Maisterravalbuena

In the last edition of APERTURA Madrid Gallery Weekend, Maisterravalbuena began the exhibition season with Elespe, presenting “Two sounds, four nights”, a compendium of images that reach the viewer like veils that cover realities whose readings will necessarily be imprecise, even dreamlike. The materials that you have superimposed in layers this time will appear added, occasionally eliminated, diluted or covered by others totally or partially; They refer, in any case, never directly, to the artist’s personal experiences or to his very subjective positions regarding the collective and socially dominant. As the gallery highlights, these works They are not vehicles to reach a common understanding or precise meanings, but rather organisms of visual resonances that expand from the hermetic.. We will be able to glimpse figures in a state of latency; It is not Elespe’s will to define himself between the figurative and the abstract, and nor does he close himself to the possibility of delving into sculpture.

We must understand as a challenge the fact that pieces of such small sizes emphasize in this way the physical processes of which they are the fruit, their materiality and the diverse languages from which they derive, ways of doing that, in addition, allow the artist the permanent search for open results and a certain indifference towards the details of the final result. Formalisms aside, his work has a philosophical dimension linked to a non-linear notion of time and the complexity of life experience that is poured into semi-transparent surfaces that are between indecipherable and hypnotic. Your observation cannot be quick either.