Elias Crespin Venezuelian - French, b. 1965

Grandchild of two celebrated artists, Venezuelan architect and sculptor Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt, born Hamburg, Germany in 1912, settled in Venezuela in 1939), and her partner, artist and designer Gerd Leufert, Elias Crespin was both exposed and encouraged to experiment with, material form from an early age. With mathematicians as parents, too, it was his technical inclinations that led him to study and work in the fields of computation and mathematics. In 2002, after fifteen years working with software companies, Crespin concentrated his in-depth knowledge and skills on a dedicated practice of art making.

 

The artist’s ability to research and apply new technological methods within his practice puts his work firmly at the intersection of technology and visual art. Ambitious, elegant installations are dominated by arrangements of hand-made geometric elements - suspended spatial forms presented in a variety of display contexts. As self-designing complex computer programs that animate custom software-controlled motors, his kinetic pieces shift and mutate, producing highly nuanced choreographic effects. Dominant in the Venezuelan art scene of his grandmother’s era from the 1950s onwards, kinetics is a form of visual stage management that elicits adaptation of variant forms and patterns. Crespin’s work is a sophisticated exploration of concepts of form, space, movement and time along with the study of colour, light and shadow, materials and texture.