Jesús Crespo

During his residency at l’Atelier Selma Feriani, the artist Jesús Crespo explores metamorphosis as an individual character through painting, channeling ambiguity and intrigue. On lubricated surfaces that he primes assiduously —an embryonic step in his process— the lines and shapes are not definitive; curvaceous, moist, elusive, fluid —at times retractable— they extend their edges to the borders of the canvas, enveloping us into an optical phenomenon that mirrors the occurrence of quicksand.

In the midst of their fibrous entanglement, the compositions emit a synaptic signal; it sparks our imagination, stimulating our gazes, in all volition, to the ‘neuron’ (multiple contortions) of the paintings, which are neither determinate nor entirely alien. They are an indefinite geometry of an organism, as if magnified under a microscopic device, slithering the frames through biomorphic abstraction. It is akin to being absorbed in the succulence of a spider’s web, set against opaline backgrounds that Crespo deliberately spares when spreading his paint, like a stretched parhelion.

He denies us the liberty of formulating our own perception of what we are seeing, or of what is being obstructed from view, through the alternate openings and closings; how do we overcome this incapacitation? Should we seek the go-between, or peer through the implied lid that leads us into uncertainty? Such is the motive behind his metamorphic shapes: to “extract the feeling that triggers us”, to unsettle the ominous gravity, and to give precedence to the pleasure of disorientation.