¿Cómo pinta? (How’s it Looking?)
April 17 - June 14, 2025

Pueblo Unido Gallery
Centro Romero
6212 N Clark St.
Chicago, IL 60660

Exhibition Statement:

A couple locked in an embrace, a sombrero left on a dashboard, musicians strumming guitars, an impromptu meal laid on a table made of overturned buckets… These are among the intimate moments and personal objects that serve as the inspiration for the paintings in ¿Cómo pinta?, a new body of paintings by Chicago-based artist Zespo. Painted after photographs taken by the artist, ¿Cómo pinta? offers glimpses inside jaripeos and bailes across the Midwest – concerts that revolve around regional Mexican music. The paintings capture the family business – Zespo’s father is a concert promoter and booking agent – and the energy of these gatherings as cultural and communal experiences vibrate at the edges of ¿Cómo pinta?. In these works, the performers, audience, and event workers are all on stage, and the cultural and social spaces within them are revealed via painterly experiments in lighting, surface, framing, space, and illusion.

Inspired by the nineteenth-century painter Édouard Manet (b. Paris, 1832 – d. Paris, 1883), Zespo embraces the impressionistic and commonplace. Although trained in a classical painting tradition, the digital and the modern enter the artist’s process as he works from photographs that isolate cropped moments, gestures, conversations, and still lifes into independent compositions. The transformation of the image continues through sketches and drawings as he experiments with translating the image using a range of scales, speeds, and iterations. He applies formal strategies of grouping, splitting, and layering to produce a confrontation between the viewer and the image to simultaneously pull us in while retaining a boundary produced by the ambiguity of the scene. Zespo intentionally opts for compositions that locate the viewer at the edge. For example, we see a group of musicians onstage but watch through the arms of a bartender pouring a drink or catch a glimpse of a pre-performance jam session in the van from the front of the vehicle. By placing the viewer on unstable ground and isolating private moments taking place in public spaces, ¿Cómo pinta? invites us to imagine the social and emotional arc of the lives of its subjects.