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Ciclo Insitu. Without the slightest. Santi Jiménez

October 31, 07 – mid-february, 08
The exhibition plays with the possibilities of drawing as a strategy of spatial reinterpretation, creating an image that enlarges the useful space assigned to these works, using a trompe-l’oeil-drawing that influences not only the Palacio de Bendaña lobby but the entire building by means of the stairwell.

Illusionism is defined, in art dictionaries, as the use of artistic techniques to create the illusion of reality in a work of art. Perspective, foreshortening and chiaroscuro are its main resources. Illusionist painting was popular during the decadence of classic art, e.g. in Pompey, and especially thereafter in baroque periods. Mantegna’s Camera degli Sposi in Mantua, finished in 1474, is one of the first examples of illusionist painting during the Renaissance. Painting that simulated architectures was called quadratura and was carried out by artists specialising in this genre. The concentration of technical ability in representing small objects, such as broken pieces of glass, dewdrops, flies or other insects, creases in paper…. with the objective of creating such an illusion is described by the French term “trompe-l’oeil.”(1)
As in all of Santi Jiménez’s work, this is a door open to the supposedly free interpretation of the image, whose construction starts from an open and ambivalent symbol questioning our perception of the visual image, along with our consumer-based vision of the work of art: he always introduces -normally using fine irony- mechanisms far removed from plastic language, to oblige us to have a slow and reflexive perceptive experience of what is displayed… in short, a critical perception.
Jiménez creates, in the small area assigned to the presentation of special projects in the Granell Foundation, a visual “trompe-l’oeil” that fits in well with the baroque structure of the Foundation building, Palacio de Bendaña. And he parodies the best tradition of decoration in fresco of the Pompeian stately home -one of the oldest examples of visual illusionism attained by painting images on walls. Jiménez works on two stretches of wall delimiting a rectangular space with two images, one of a group and another featuring a single figure: both scenes from a very different source seem to communicate with each other.
This young artist’s career has always been characterised by the use of the digital collage as a strategy to construct a plastic image that always offers dialogue with the spectator; the image is built using a slow process of compilation and analysis of fragments of pre-existing images from all fields: film, comic, advertising, domestic file, the Internet… in short, products from today’s visual culture. The process of image construction is essential in the work of Jiménez, who claims that the real work is the process.
Jiménez, with his fine scalpel, removes fragments of images, which are often highly topical, from their natural environment; once incorporated into his collages, we find it impossible to associate them with their original source. The artist activates a repetitive and perverse game to highlight our inability to analyse the images surrounding us, and our even worse ability to analyse the fragment, what is hidden, the image’s underlying structure. And he stresses that his interest is placed in the mechanisms of the superstructure that generates the image, in our evocation of its unequivocal, targeted, servile interpretation -it is not the image itself that interests him but what is behind it -and what he presents is the deconstruction of the set design, of the method, what has passed for representation, reality and truth, in short, for many centuries: all that which has its texture.
Monse Cea, 2007

[1]Diccionario de términos de arte. Luis Monreal y Tejada R.G.Haggar. Ed Juventud