ERIK JEREZANO

Erik Jerezano was born in Mexico City in 1973. He is a self-taught artist who arrived to Toronto in 2001. Since then he has exhibited his work in galleries and artist-run centres across Canada, Mexico and Europe. He was awarded a Toronto Arts Council Emerging Artist grant, Ontario Arts Council Emerging Artist grant and his work was selected by the Drawing Center Viewing program in New York and the Art registry program of Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach California.

In the past, he was involved in community arts projects in Mexico City, where he collaborated on outdoor murals. In 2004, he and two other artists created Zotz Collective. The artists meet weekly to collaborate on multi-media works that include drawing, painting, collage, portable sculpture and the written word. Residencies include Baie-Saint-Paul Quebec organized by the Musee D'art Contemporain De Baie-Saint-Paul.

Request image list

Toronto artist Erik Jerezano is a visceral mark-maker engaged in a daily exploration of full scale myth-building. His figurative-based practice combines anthropomorphism, fable and the grotesque in ways that offer abstract encounters with what he refers to as the visceral-intuitive.

This prolific artist has long been engaged in creating free-floating compositions that accumulate and interact both visually and narratively. By combining paint, chinese ink, charcoal and pencil, Jerezano has developed a system of diverse marks and lines that allow him to intuitively explore an increasingly complex, character-driven world. His sense of composition is often chaotic, exploiting a crude-meets-elegant approach that is used to great advantage over hundreds of drawings, investing them with a kind of lush, animal energy.

In each new image, Jerezano’s odd-bodied figures continue to take centre stage. These murky limb-benders attend to unknown tasks, phantasmorically dancing their way through open spaces with little indication of background. Manimal shapes toss about body parts, step on and though one another, shed their skins or sprout horns; they are busy living out their lives.

Despite the surreal undertones of much of the work, there is something oddly natural captured in the mood of each moment. Through these drawings, we as viewers are witness to a fully developed internal system motivated by behaviour, instinct, and, most importantly, a human-like sense of ritual.

Mark Laliberte, January 2009