October 14 through November 11, 2023
Extended through November 25
Opening Reception: Saturday, October 14, 6-9 pm
Emmanuel Crespo, who joined the gallery in 2014 has been wickedly fun to watch develop as a man and an artist.
In Sacred Spaces, which opens Saturday, October 14th at Bermudez Projects gallery in Cypress Park, the artist unveils a new and important waystation on his journey as an artist, with a deep worldview.
In meeting Crespo, you immediately come to know he’s a thoughtful man, and that he uses his art to figure out existence, and his existence to figure out his art. “I often filter my experiences through a desire for the sacred,” he says. “I use the term sacred to simply refer to situations with a larger, grander, wiser, and more intricate narrative. This may be a result of my interests in religion/mythology and its implications, nevertheless I am constantly viewing the world through a lens of symbolism and mythical narrative.”
The birds are there, but the people are the stars of this show.
In nine works dubbed Cosmic Pedestrians, everyday people, lovingly rendered, are walking, their heads in front of what first appear to be portholes onto the cosmos. (They are, in fact, real NASA starscapes.) But these are halos, and when you realize this, the walkers remind you of saints in religious paintings. But, says Emmanuel, these sanctified pedestrians carry the infinite within themselves, are all momentary coagulations of the infinite.” We are the universe; the universe is us.
It bears mentioning that Cosmic Pedestrians illustrates a marked change in Crespo’s style. The artworks display a richer sense of realism in a couple of ways: these characters are real people, not archetypes; and because they represent real people, they have a strong 3-dimensional quality. This might be interpreted to signify that the artist is now confident enough to take his worldview out of the dreamscapes of his previous collections, and make it apply to real people that he clearly cares about.
But, the artist still dreams.
In the large-scale work, Spring, a young girl – perhaps his daughter, who was the star of his 2018 children’s book To the Moon and Back – watches birds circling a floating skull; in the more intimately-scaled, Man in the Desert, an older businessman walks a golden path between universe and desert; a ripe sweet potato sprouts on a windowsill in The Curtain; and, an ebon-feathered bird with the cosmos imbued into its wings asks, “Who are you and what do you want?”
“As Emmanuel has grown older, tending a marriage, raising a daughter – he has matured as an artist,” says gallerist Julian Bermudez. “His technique, always strong, has become more nuanced and adventurous. His themes at first hinted at – maybe because was still exploring, peeling away, and peering into what he meant – have drawn into a clearer focus.”