Artistic statement

"EMILIO JIMONE"

My work and artistic training have always been born from an intuition about what surrounds me, informed by my sensitivity and observation. As a child, living in the provinces of Mexico City, I contemplated the natural mountain landscape. Memories that I now associate with concepts such as spatiality, light, colors, and sounds. The calm and ruggedness that somehow permeates it reflected in me a desire to connect directly with nature.

My encounter with the big city in Mexico City happened at a very young age. Let's say I didn't lose my Eden, but rather, the close connection I had with the rural landscape was paused. In Mexico City, I insert myself into the contemporary world I live in, just as I go out into the countryside to pursue various kinds of projects and recharge my batteries. I assimilate and practice the discipline of drawing to make sense of what surrounds me through my internal reflections on my experiences, their continuity in various media such as painting, graphics, and to a lesser extent animation, three-dimensionality, and how to manipulate it to intervene in the landscape or urban public space.

In the development of my artistic process, I have found parallels in the acts of creation and destruction that humans carry out in nature. That is, connections between organic forms I perceive in the world and the contrast with the urban. This leads me to investigate how we relate to nature, its connection to origin and primordial chaos. I start from the concept of the ephemeral, contrasting with the notion of permanence. I am committed to the daily work of the creative path of art and life.

I am also interested in the eroticism that manifests or persists in the human attitude of perceiving the world through a different lens: first, the source of seduction with the body, its intrinsic value in my eyes, its vortex to the point of obsession. There is also a connotation that is both transgressive and seductive at the same time. I try to capture pleasure in a pictorial image, proposing to represent the scene by combining elements such as fire, air, water, earth, and energy in motion. I find myself between figuration and abstraction, searching for a sense of reality, with a neo-expressionist tendency but conscious of formulating personal technical and visual discoveries, exploring new media in my work.

In my work, I find an open window toward a portal that emerges into a different reality, both the imagination and the cerebral eye, the heart, and the corporeal hand, where both characters and atmospheres reveal how they differ from my urban circumstances. Through drawing on various media, I address the demands of a daily practice of chaos and order related as an indivisible whole.

My interests in art are extensive and, above all, honest. I am aware that there is a saturation of the visual today and the proposals are varied in contemporary art. I work with painting as an invocation, as a mystery, I delve into poetic magic, and as a percussionist, I investigate the rhythm that encompasses some of the world's cultures. Therefore, I am a visual artist with a deep interest in human sensitivity, with nature as its own and collective healing.

Instructed and trained in the approach to Western art history as well as its avant-garde movements, I am deeply interested in the art of the geopolitical peripheries, knowing that there are no winners in dominant discourses, but rather the validity of the art that emerges from countries like my own, Mexico, which is known for its enormous cultural tradition, its power in sculpture and painting, and its vast anthropological past. The validity of its power, which transcends today, disrupts dominant discourses that establish politically, opening up possibilities for voices like mine, where the profound message of my work combines poetic action and expressive force to bear witness to the social, political, and ecological emergency for the difficult human moment and what lies ahead.

My daily practice is drawing, and I carry it out in projects in artist's notebooks, graphic editions such as lithography, engraving, fanzines, and collaborations with poets and performance artists, combining easel painting with a theatrical tendency to engage in active discourse. Using recycled objects and giving them another context blends popular culture with the dominant language. I make collage a means of expression that manifests the free association of mixed media. In the year of the pandemic, my practice consisted solely of riding my bike, working on small models in the studio, and drawing in a sketchbook.