Elías
Peña Salvador(b. 1992, Spain) graduated from the Fine Art Department of the
Complutense University of Madrid in 2014, is an award-winning painter from
Madrid with extensive experience in both Asia and Europe. Elías has been invited
to participate in national and international exhibitions around the world,
including solo and group shows in Hong Kong, China, Spain, Romania, and Italy.
He is a recipient of the Erasmus Scholarship in Fine Art, and has received
numerous awards such as the prestigious “Arte Laguna International Painting
Prize” in Venice, Italy.
While
in Spain, Salvador earned a Masters in Teaching where he mentored students;
most recently, in 2020 before the pandemic he worked as a volunteer professor
with children on the autism spectrum using art as a safe platform for
expression and therapy. Elías has also been selected to participate in various
international artist residencies, including the renowned Swatch Art Peace Hotel
residency in Shanghai as well as residencies in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Rotterdam,
and Bucharest. Elías is part of PROA, an important artists’ collective and art
studio in Madrid that promotes local art in Spain with a global perspective.
With
each move, he sought new means to capture the colliding perspectives he
observed as Elias lived throughout Europe and Asia. The feeling of “home” and
my identity is something that has always been present in his work.
Elias
Peña utilize´s painting to explore the emotions around human connection and how
it relates to identity, from the personal to the political and sociocultural.
He express the multitude of realities carried by people, and in doing so, find
his own voice to channel these stories.
Art
can be egotistical and Elias aims to challenge that. The main way he have
delved into this idea is through tagging. Tagging is a push back against
structures that affirm and deny access, in the same way that graffiti artists are denied access to public spaces. In the art world today, there is a barrier of entry into elite realms.
Elias use of the “crown” as a compositional element in my paintings is in
response to this - a way to express commentary and critique by drawing
attention to something fraught or humorous.
For
Elías, painting is a tool of communication between myself and the world - a
powerful catalyst for emotion. His paintings are representations of feeling,
the ebb and flow of life and its subjectivities. They blur the boundaries
between the figurative and the abstract, drawing and painting, harmony and chaos,
intention and chance. A constant back and forth. The drawing layer serves as
architectural bones that give him the freedom to apply paint in a less
conscious way - reaching the moment where the wave breaks, revealing what
exists beyond the figurative, that remains open and fluid to the viewr´s
interpretation.
