Jesús Crespo

At Ladrón de Guevara, we are increasingly less inclined to make distinctions between the figurative and the abstract; we have become a society in which such dichotomies are losing their relevance, even becoming anachronistic, and not only in a field as specific as visual arts, but also in science and the way we understand ourselves as a society…

Is Jesús's painting abstract or figurative? It really doesn’t matter. What concerns us is trying to grasp the art of new generations as faithfully as possible, in line with what they are attempting to decipher and express through their work, whatever the discipline may be. Sam Gilliam, one of the most influential African-American artists of his time, who recently passed away, understood that abstract painting (at the time, these distinctions were upheld as epitomes of artistic understanding) was political in the sense that it forced the viewer to question something they didn’t understand, to make a more conscious effort to comprehend something that was, at first glance, unintelligible.

Can Jesús's work then be both poetic and political? Of course it can, because above all, it is art being created with a heightened awareness of the time in which the artist lives, and it is in these important and vulnerable moments that we need to support these creators.