Reflection by Emilio Jiménez:
The pieces were created in early spring of 2021. They are four paintings that responded to the state of internal improvement in personal and somewhat collective mood brought on by the pandemic. My work in the studio during 2020 was very dark and pessimistic, violent and chaotic in drawing. The process was gradual, with a lot of notetaking and drawing, which I returned to with great force and sometimes gave some clues as to where I should continue.
The next steps, as I reviewed my notebooks, I realized I didn't have a theme or a project, but as I observed nature's insistence on simple and sometimes more complex forms, while making the 10-minute bike ride from my house to my studio, I began to have reflections on the daily work routine and survival, knowing that people were dying and the world was in shock as the pandemic paused the planet.
Being aware of my will to remain, I continued drawing regardless of what happened to me. My work within my field was to make internal maps of emotions. The idea of contemplating the landscape made me realize that one is part of what is observed, which is very important because it shakes up the modern idea of extraction and depredation of the environment, of the land, of people, of species. Thus, I began painting with great enthusiasm, using warm colors and a light that tempers the image and the articulated notion of the individual, the landscape, the chaos, and the universe that shapes health and illness in a body that depends on the health of the ecosystem. My series of four paintings speak of a sick body recovered and revolutionized. The intention of the landscape is a contemplation-action of the image: sunsets where fiction and reality merge.
EMILIO JIMONE.
- Artist.
Mexico, January, 2022.
Review by Guillermo Aragón Rivas, of the Artwork of Emilio Jimone.
To explore this artist's expressionist work is to immerse oneself in the depths of the human ordeal. His language, at times abstract, furious, and explosive, at other times joyful, tender, and free, uses abstraction and allegorical drawing to represent the dual nature of reality.
Jimone has established chaos as a creative expression in his semiotics, visualizing it as the transformative element necessary for the viewer to narrate their own story within the aesthetic discourse that skillfully winks at the most primitive part of our reflections.
Using countless techniques and media ranging from tempera to installation and performance, Jimone pays homage to the transition from colonial art to the avant-garde of the 20th century, but goes further, reclaiming in his work expressions as varied and forgotten by academia as Art Brut, graffiti, and Dadaist collage.
Escape from the labyrinths that burn us is, if I may say so, less painful if we follow the thread Emilio Jimone offers us to understand the night of our own reality.
Guillermo Aragón Rivas.
- Art critic.
Mexico, April 29, 2020.
Review by Luis Ramaggio | The Artwork of Emilio Jiménez:
Ideas have a vocation. And they float. But that's not something that's evident in the materialization of art or in the philosophical choreography that accompanies—almost—every artistic discourse lately. The vocation of every idea precedes, even, the thought that later gives it form. It's perceived. It's assimilated through non-naming or through the nomadic gaze that distances itself from the cultural code and its conceptual commitments. In other words, ideas are read with a difficult and uneducated sense: forgetting.
Emilio Jiménez is a young artist whose vocation is precisely that: to give a vocation to the idea; not the opposite. Because the easy thing for him would have been to develop his evident drawing talent and his clear relationship with gestures and emotional signs, as his works clearly connote. But he prefers to tame ideas. He likes to imagine that some sacred communion exists between things and their forms. As if every being were a disciple of its form or some such situation. It makes me think of gods and miracles; of materiality and its suffocating need for space. Exactly like this; like these letters and their unhealthy relationship with the ideas that haunt them as I speak: a metaphor for a metaphor.
And Emilio's work could be misinterpreted if one doesn't consider its dimensional scope (the suggested narrative, the alluded conceptuality, and that poignant discursive economy), since it closely participates with craftsmanship and technical exploration. But his pieces are clearly emotional "accesses." Each of his works is a nameless door, opening as one looks at it. Like silence. From the front, the viewer receives a micro-education upon looking at them. A sensorial instructive lesson and some aesthetic slaps. His pieces receive the plastic treatment of the organic, but they never compromise the sign of what is "portrayed." In his work, "beings" with strange vocations appear: gestures, winks, contrasts, transparencies, blurring, textures, and other agents that operate aggressively in the viewer's perception. He is not a craftsman. Emilio is searching for formulas for communion between the worlds of concepts and the "creative transe." Like a sorcerer's apprentice, he urges himself to defragment realities and characters. To disfigure ideas and reasons. He invokes; he does not materialize. But the exercise compels and enthralls him: As an artist, he remains alone in a dimension of shipwrecked ideas that would describe some kind of "universal instance," or principle of reality if verbalized; as a creator, he focuses on a tone of creative rigor and a great deal of discursive discipline.
Where is he going? To himself? What for?
Emilio Jiménez could be placed in almost any creative profession, as he possesses a reactive existential ingredient: consciousness. He doesn't succumb to symbolic adaptation, nor does he allow himself to be trapped by cultural "frequencies." However, there are still boundaries within himself. Things that are watching him closely as he questions the world. So far, his work operates independently and with great confidence. There is a strange mathematics he worships in his compositions, which range from graphic "doings" to performative interpretations and conceptual games. His creativity leans toward deconstructive readings of "ultimate" structures and forms; he likes his work to be the result of his profound reasoning. When you look at it, it vanishes. When you name it, it becomes two.
Guilty?
Furthermore, much could be said about his work, as it is ever-changing and dynamic. It reminds me of those will-o'-the-wisps or fatta morgana that the eye so covets. I predict a radical event soon in his creative world. A revelation, or the sublimation of something that until now has been commonplace, and that he and his art ignore. Because in the end, everything is a hint of another everything. Also.
Luis Ramaggio.
- Art critic.
Mexico, September 16, 2013.