For this exhibition, the artist will present paintings that explore intimate moments of social exchange inspired by the artist’s experience at Mexican dance events across the Midwest. Working in a range of scales, speeds, and iterations across canvas and paper, the artist introduces formal strategies of grouping, splitting, and layering to confront the viewer by both visually pulling them in and pushing them out. In these works, the performers, audience, and event workers are all on stage and the cultural and social space is investigated through traditional painting questions of light, surface, framing, illusion and pictorial space.
Zespo is a Chicago-based artist focused primarily on painting and drawing. His practice consists of composing and reworking images taken from direct observation and his personal cell phone camera in an effort to situate social and cultural experiences and conditions within a tradition of figurative painting. His work is traversed by the strangeness and familiarity that is implied by being over there and over here, by a push and pull, by light and shadow, by what is inside and what is outside, and by the notion of fragment and totality.