Anthropopology
Cisco Jimenez
Opening
May 9, 5:30-8 pm
Exhibition Dates
May 30 – June 23, 2019
Venue
1824 Spring St, Houston TX 77019
Please join us on Thursday, May 9 from 5:30 – 8 pm for the opening reception of Anthropopology, an exhibition featuring works from well known Mexican artist, Cisco Jimenez. Taking the route of traditional advertising images, Cisco twists them into works that delve into the complex themes of economic, political, and social proportions throughout Latin America.
Drawing from the divide between contemporary art and folklore art, Cisco utilizes witty humor and a wide color palette to balance the visual action of political criticism and social malevolence that plagues the Americas. Works stemming from these artistic tethering between thresholds of historical relevance and pop references have been featured in museums in Mexico, Holland, Spain, Chile, United States, and Ecuador.
Cisco Jimenez
Tint on paper and stickers
12.2 x 9.5 in
2017
Cisco Jimenez
Tint on paper and stickers
12.2 x 9.5 in
2018
Cisco’s artistic career, spanning over 30 years, includes exhibitions in Paris, Miami, Edinburgh, Spain, Costa Rica, New York. Private collections including The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, Andres Blaisten Collection, the Colección Fundación Cultural Televisa, Jimmie Durham Collection in Berlin, the Francesco Pellizzi Collection in New York, the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in London, and the Tom Patchett Collection in Los Angeles. His imagery is bold and daring, peeling back the layers of the human condition with points of sarcasm and discord are noted by multiple art critics and collectors.
Cisco Jimenez
Tint on paper and stickers
12.2 x 9.5 in
2018
This advertising images of the good life create an insecure and unachievable standard of living. Jimenez’ humorous paintings portray the theory of cruelty. They remind us of Picasso’s Guernica without a court or jury, but instead a Mexican sense of humor, not as cruel as Spanish humor (Cervantes) and not sentimental, except for it strange sense of attraction.
Cisco’s work is a hybrid between painting and sculpture. The painting aspect tends to speak or argue with itself with areas of discord, transporting it forcefully to another area. In every way, a dance succeeds it. Cisco makes the frames for his paintings, in a similar way that his maps and plans for nuclear plants pretend to be representative of an official reality. These begin a new set of discussions and agreements that force painting to admit that it is an “object”. -Jimmie Durham
These energies are the basis to articulate metaphors into a kind of the “ironic debris”, as ARTNEWS magazine described. The context for the gestation of the work is of crucial importance and one in which the anthropologic vision that precedes the aesthetic proposition and all its possible implications manifest itself in a variety of disciplines.
Another important aspect of the work is humor, from the most simple and superficial to the picaresque irony that reaches insolence. Humor and paradox are a constant in Latin American life as in the case of Mexico. With humor comes the political criticism and social rancor that become the binding element in my drawings, collages, paintings, and objects.