Jerónimo Elespe
19 Apr - 19 May 2012
JERÓNIMO ELESPE
19 April - 19 May 2012
For his second exhibition with Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, using as a point of departure various autobiographical narratives, Jeronimo Elespe presents us with a reflection about domestic life and the metaphors that it casts in relation to the creative process.
Each of his works follows a slow and cumulative development, over the period of months or even years. Elespe explores, in his small-sized paintings, the capacity of the artist’s home and studio to become at the same time both a shelter and a cell, often using literary references along a path which is traced from “A Rebours” by Joris Karl Huysmans, to the dark vision of architecture as something alive and vibrant from the steady hand of Edgar Allan Poe, or Breton and his concept of the house as a labyrinth and replica of the structure of the subconscious.
The fact that in this case the artist’s studio is inside the artist’s home, in a certain way the interior of an interior, allows Elespe to stress Walter Benjamin’s idea of the artist’s home as a spider’s web, as well as showing its monastic side and that of the artist’s denial of the world in order to study it. This dichotomy between domestic life and studio life is at the same time both a motive of conflict as well as one of affinity, in Elespe’s small and intimate works, both share the sensation of timelessness and that of being continuously set in the present: the absorption for a specific moment which paradoxically benefits and feeds off what is cyclical as well as off our everyday tasks.
The interest in tranquillity and in the different narrative cycles inside the home has important influences in Ozu’s cinema and Chardin’s painting, clearly contrasting with the literary influences mentioned before, those with a markedly obsessive and nocturnal character. The dualities that appear in Elespe’s work, the serene and the obsessive, experimentation and literality, intuition and rationality, have their root embedded in the nature of the slow process of the studio. The delicate works evolve experimenting with different pictorial languages in the way of palimpsest and autobiographical annotation, representing, as a mode of conclusion, complex abstract diaries.
Jerónimo Elespe (Madrid, 1975) studied Fine Arts at Yale University (USA) and has developed his artistic career in New York and Madrid, with numerous exhibitions in Europe and the United States.
He has recently presented his work at CAC Málaga, in a solo exhibition accompanied by the publication of a catalogue with a text by Dan Byers, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
19 April - 19 May 2012
For his second exhibition with Galeria Soledad Lorenzo, using as a point of departure various autobiographical narratives, Jeronimo Elespe presents us with a reflection about domestic life and the metaphors that it casts in relation to the creative process.
Each of his works follows a slow and cumulative development, over the period of months or even years. Elespe explores, in his small-sized paintings, the capacity of the artist’s home and studio to become at the same time both a shelter and a cell, often using literary references along a path which is traced from “A Rebours” by Joris Karl Huysmans, to the dark vision of architecture as something alive and vibrant from the steady hand of Edgar Allan Poe, or Breton and his concept of the house as a labyrinth and replica of the structure of the subconscious.
The fact that in this case the artist’s studio is inside the artist’s home, in a certain way the interior of an interior, allows Elespe to stress Walter Benjamin’s idea of the artist’s home as a spider’s web, as well as showing its monastic side and that of the artist’s denial of the world in order to study it. This dichotomy between domestic life and studio life is at the same time both a motive of conflict as well as one of affinity, in Elespe’s small and intimate works, both share the sensation of timelessness and that of being continuously set in the present: the absorption for a specific moment which paradoxically benefits and feeds off what is cyclical as well as off our everyday tasks.
The interest in tranquillity and in the different narrative cycles inside the home has important influences in Ozu’s cinema and Chardin’s painting, clearly contrasting with the literary influences mentioned before, those with a markedly obsessive and nocturnal character. The dualities that appear in Elespe’s work, the serene and the obsessive, experimentation and literality, intuition and rationality, have their root embedded in the nature of the slow process of the studio. The delicate works evolve experimenting with different pictorial languages in the way of palimpsest and autobiographical annotation, representing, as a mode of conclusion, complex abstract diaries.
Jerónimo Elespe (Madrid, 1975) studied Fine Arts at Yale University (USA) and has developed his artistic career in New York and Madrid, with numerous exhibitions in Europe and the United States.
He has recently presented his work at CAC Málaga, in a solo exhibition accompanied by the publication of a catalogue with a text by Dan Byers, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Art.