Jerónimo Elespe's work invites oblique approaches and encourages indeterminate, almost oneiric readings, through images that appear as veils concealing other realities. His works are formed by multiple layers of materials that have been added, removed, diluted, or covered—partially or entirely—by others. In this way, palimpsests are created in which narratives persist whose sources and references—autobiographical, literary, or linked to the history of painting—form part, indistinctly, of the artist's intimate sphere of experience, from which the personal and subjective positions itself before the collective as a dominant structure. Elespe's works are not vehicles for reaching common understanding or precise meanings, but organisms of visual resonances that expand outward from the hermetic.
The emphasis on process, materiality, and the different languages employed allows the artist a continuous pursuit of open results, while suggesting his indifference toward any definitive outcome. This attitude acquires a philosophical dimension concerning the non-linearity of time and the complexity of lived experience, through semi-transparent, fluctuating, and hypnotic surfaces that prove seductive precisely because one can only attempt to decipher what is not absolute. The frequent use of small formats—oils on aluminum panel or linen, worked over months or even years—far from limiting the work, intensifies it: within a minimal surface many things occur, and the time of labor sedimented in each layer demands from the viewer a slow, sustained, and intimate attention.
Jerónimo Elespe (Madrid, 1975) trained at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he graduated in 1999, and subsequently completed his MFA at Yale University (2001). After twelve years in New York, he returned to Madrid in 2008, where he lives and works. Among his institutional solo and group exhibitions are the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga (2012), the Centro del Carmen (Valencia, 2014), Ivorypress (Madrid, 2014), and his participation in Colección Soledad Lorenzo: Punto de encuentro at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2017). In 2018 he participated in The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts). In 2024 he presented Dos sonidos, cuatro noches at Maisterravalbuena (Madrid). His work is held in collections including the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), the Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery (Saratoga Springs, New York), the Colección Banco de España, and the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga, among others.