Jeff Elrod

Simon Lee Gallery, London

Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2014

“Each of the steps in [Jeff] Elrod’s methodology is akin to crossing a portal, though the process rarely unfolds in identical paths for each work. The paintings are created using sophisticated programs like Photoshop and Illustrator, altered digitally and printed onto canvas through a painstaking process that ensures every slightest shade of color and tone remains true to its onscreen appearance. Each canvas may be worked on manually both before and after this elaborate printing process, with accretions, subtractions, or a flurry of applied, white line negative spaces. These latter are practically an Elrod trademark, an impressive dance of non-lines in the form of thin-cut narrow bands of masking tape, which seal off the application of paints to create spectral filaments of non-paint (the mirror image of Pollock’s painterly drips). There is no one tried or true method, and the final results rarely betray the painter’s process. Here is the ultimate paradox: despite the technical printing prowess that produces these works, each is resolutely unique and unduplicatable, due to the inherent vicissitudes of the process of its making. As Elrod goes from one step to the next, the formal qualities of the work – its colors, shape, marks and non-marks – are orchestrated in a careful balance, and what appears random can often be the result of endless trial-and-error.”

– Joachim Pissaro with Jeffrey Fraiman, “Jeff Elrod: Painting Portals,” in Jeff Elrod: Figment (New York: Vito Schnabel Gallery, 2017), p. 5.