Van Doren Waxter is pleased to present works by Jeronimo Elespe across the gallery’s online platforms. This special online presentation will run from May 6 - May 19, 2020.
Reflective of Jeronimo Elespe’s multi-faceted approach to mark-making, this selection of work from the past three years highlights Elespe’s fluidity through medium, working in various printing processes, drawing, and painting. Fluidity, as both a process and motif in Elespe’s practice, manifests itself through the artist’s mining of interior life. The layered images of his work revealing themselves in a gesture not unlike the process of remembering a distant dream, or obscured memory.
Living and working out of his home studio in Madrid, the domestic imbues itself across all of Elespe’s work, most of which being so intimately scaled that they replicate the artist’s personal and autobiographical relationship to his work. This internal focus begins as a layering of observations and memories with still life and portraits, often becoming abstracted and fragmented over the course of the work’s creation. While memory demands time to become what it is, time nevertheless thwarts memory, veiling its details, and uncannily producing alternate narratives of life, a cognitive pentimento.
While most known for his paintings, oscillating between painting on aluminum, panel, and canvas, Elespe’s drawing practice equally highlights the critical aspect of surface in his work. Elespe’s drawings and prints emphasize the textural qualities of the paper surface and etching plates, asserting the importance of cumulative line-making. This action of working in linear sequences, and in reverse in the case of the etchings, visually evokes the mental process of recalling distant narratives.
Indeed, the concept of the obscured narrative pervades Elespe work through both visual symbols and textual signs. Elespe’s enigmatic imagery is often accompanied by titles that suggest a story fragment, a piece of a visual puzzle whose signifiers endlessly point to the impossibility of semiotic fixity. With extremely detailed craftsmanship, Elespe constructs a personal narrative out of diverse totemic symbols, the piecing together of which becomes a beautiful reflection of the artist’s internal psyche; the ultimate interior space, layered and fleeting.
JERONIMO ELESPE (b. 1975) lives and works in Madrid. He was educated at Yale University, CT (MFA) and School of Visual Arts, NY (BFA). Elespe has had solo shows at Van Doren Waxter, New York (2018), Maisterravalbuena, Madrid (2018); Labor Gallery, Mexico City (2015); Ivorypress, Madrid (2014); and a solo museum exhibition CAC Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Malaga, Spain (2012). Group exhibitions include The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2018); Go Figure at Van Doren Waxter, New York, NY (2017); Colección Soledad Lorenzo: Punto de encuentro at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2017). His work is included in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY; and the Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid.