Crespo_The First Lesson

Crespo_The First Lesson

November 15 through December 27, 2014
Opening Reception: Saturday, Novembver 15, 7-10PM

A man seeks counsel from a whale as a murder of crows fly overhead; a young elephant crouches in front of a faceless child sitting on a tree stump, offering a branch with its trunk; and a goldfish in mid-air looks upon the focused gaze of a crow. These dreamlike apparitions are the beautifully-rendered imaginings of artist Emmanuel Crespo in his new exhibit, “Talking Through the Door.”

Although this is the 16th show since 2000 for the Otis College graduate, this exhibit represents a deeply personal exploration for Crespo.

“My recent body of work,” he writes, “is about my discovery of symbolic meanings and narratives in my life and the world around me. With these paintings, I’ve created a cast of characters that were used to uncover these narratives, which tend to center on metaphysical themes.”

Take, for instance, the aforementioned crow, seen possibly conversing with a goldfish in one work, fleeing or, perhaps circling, the man and the whale in another work. The crow, Crespo says, “is something I observe in my day-to-day, but I always found it to be such an interesting and powerfully symbolic image. Whether flying overhead, or perched on a wire, it always seemed both ominous and auspicious, hinting at a world that existed just beneath the visible.”

“Talking Through the Door” includes approximately 20 acrylic on birch panel paintings, as well as 6 framed watercolors on paper. The panels are left intentionally raw, as Crespo abandons the usual procedure of priming, then painting the background and subject matter. That process, Crespo says, “completely covers up its materiality. The viewer would then be expected to forget this wooden surface and peer through it as a window into another world. I did not want the viewer to forget about the panel. Instead, the raw physical qualities of the panel, its values, grains, and textures, became a stage for my symbolic apparitions to appear. The raw surface was an attempt to merge the mundane world of my daily life with the world of metaphysical symbols and narratives.”

The exhibit’s title, “Talking Through the Door,” comes from a poem by the 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi, translated here by Coleman Barks:

You said, Who’s at the door? 
I said, Your slave.

You said, What do you want? 
To see you and bow. 

We talked through the door. I claimed 
a great love and that I had given up 
what the world gives to be in that love.

You said, Such claims require a witness.
I said, This longing, these tears

Crespo says, “It feels as if the poet is at the threshold of his desires. I feel I have the same relationship to the symbols and narratives that I try to uncover: I desire to uncover, connect, and understand, but I am at the threshold and can’t seem to step further.”

Yet, the journey is what it’s all about, and Crespo’s paintings take us on a wonderful, sometimes disturbing, but always enriching trip.

Emmanuel Crespo (b. 1977) was born in Quezon City, Philippines and moved to the United States at the age of 6. He received his MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 2002. His work has been featured in group and solo shows throughout Southern California, including the Armory Center for the Arts, Sweeney Art Gallery, and The Brewery. He is a full-time art instructor at Bishop Alemany High School in Mission Hills. He is also a member of the Los Angeles Artist Association. In 2013, he painted the Nomination Certificate for the Extraordinary Awards.  Crespo lives and works in Sylmar, CA.