Jeff Elrod: ESP

Galerie Max Hetzler is delighted to announce ESP, Jeff Elrod’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery.

An American abstract painter, Jeff Elrod employs both digital and manual processes in the different stages of his work to create paintings related to the computer aesthetics and imagery, representing since the early 1990’s a new singular position in abstract painting.

The exhibition will feature recent large-scale paintings. The different facets of Elrod’s art are to be discovered: on some of the works, the motives are blurred and resist to focus, while on others, the lines seem to express a language. There is no background or foreground. The shaped canvases are like a direct evocation of the different windows of a computer, or of the layers of a file. Some motives are copied, repeated; others play on positive/negative effects. Elrod’s experiments in composition, form, texture are usually informed by both the history of abstract painting and perceptual experiments, and the evolution of sophisticated technologies. The computer imagery is rendered through acrylic paint, using tape and airbrush, and sometimes his sketches are also directly printed on the canvas.

« I am a formalist painter. It's always about the form, the composition. My task is to get the painting off the screen and onto the canvas (...) I'm very comfortable with the screen (...) for me, it's a very natural way to draw. The space is a screen instead of a window » J.E.

The title of the exhibition, ESP, can be read in some of the paintings. These three letters likely stand for “Extra Sensory Perception”. Using the computer instead of the hand during the first stages of the creative process, Elrod allows himself to engage his subconscious mind as “a digital breed of automatic writing”. ESP could also be the diminutive of EL ESPECTRO, the spectre, and also the title of a song by the Texan punk rock band Scratch Acid.

Each painting in the exhibition is a dense and ambiguous surface to look at, always concerned with the relationship between the human and the machine, and their reciprocal mimesis.