Jeronimo Elespe

Through a slow cumulative process of addition and subtraction, lasting months or even years each one of Jerónimo Elespe’s paintings reveals itself as a platform to investigate the nature of time and memory.

Taking autobiographical references as starting points, the artist examines painting and drawing as a record of reality and fiction. Often working in very small formats, he explores the physical properties of the works by opening a contradictory space between the purely materialistic part of the reduced pieces, and their theme, which usually refer to states being close to the immaterial.

On his enigmatic pieces installations, Elespe stresses the importance of using the exhibition space as a place in which the viewer must actively work establishing rhythms and potential routes between the works, thus making the observation of small pieces a physical act that replicates the artist in his studio. Creating, in short, a sense to the transfer between artist and viewer.

Along with a thorough study of the history of painting, with sources as diverse as the symbolist and decadent French literature of the late nineteenth century or Donald Barthelme and JG Ballard’s narrative, among others, they play a key role in Elespe’s practice, following a dialogue between reality and fiction in which the works fulfill both the function of ambiguous and very personal abstract journals, experimentation tools of various languages and pictorial repositories of memory created fictions.