Jeronimo Elespe’s paintings in this exhibition, all oil on aluminum panel, include a new series of portraits, landscapes, domestic interiors and abstractions. Elespe’s paintings are rooted in personal experience of friends, family and home as filtered by time, memory and the process of painting. Their small scale format and crisp presentation (the unframed works are secured to the gallery walls with velcro) emphasizes the important physical qualities of painting as both an object and a picture. The thin aluminum edges of an Elespe painting can be just as compelling as any of the most virtuostic passage in a garden landscape or domestic scene. Elespe works on many paintings at once, over a period of time, sometimes months or even years and the accumulation of paint symbolizes the history of a picture’s lifespan from the private and secret life of the artist’s studio to the public life of a gallery setting – and back again into the private, public and secret life of the owner. Balanced by this idea of transference and history is a firm appetite on behalf of the artist for experimentation and the fantastic. A somber realism permeates portraits of “Carmelo”, “Clara T.” and “F.E. ” while an ethereal metamorphosis transforms the figures in “Chanatip”, “Abril” and “Aurico”. Traces of Goya and Valazquez permeate these portraits while a quasi religious spirituality spews forth from “J. Benjamin”. Like his artistic icon, the early Renaissance painter Antonello de Mesina, Elespe blends a serious of historical styles to create art that looks back while looking forward.

Jeronimo Elespe was born in Madrid, Spain in 1975 where he currently lives and works. He received an MFA in Painting from Yale University in 2001. This will be his fifth solo exhibition in New York. He will have an upcoming solo exhibition at CAC Malaga, Spain in 2011.