Néstor Jiménez

Néstor Jiménez (Mexico City, 1988). Visual Artist graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Pintura Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda”, Néstor Jiménez’s work focusses on the relationship between the collective political and historical memory, and social movements that emerged in the late 1980s on the eastern outskirts of Mexico City.
Highlighting the processes that constructed these memories, Jiménez portrays the discursive and iconographic distortion of Leftist (Marxist-Leninist) thinking and how those memories shaped socio-political realities in Mexico by using memory exercises, reconstructed actions and invented versions of historical events.
To represent said ideas, Jiménez paints over recovered materials that are prominent in popular and residual housing in Mexico and proposes distorted versions of the architecture and landscape of the areas as starting points to reflect how the representations of these territories serve as political tools.
Jiménez also attempts to portray the different ways in which violence is represented by official media outlets in order to build an artistic archive that is antagonistic towards the state in regards to the historical development of social mobilization and political tensions that this generates when inserted in private and state spaces.
His work is mainly carried out in painting, video and installation.

PROYECTOS MONCLOVA

For the first iteration of SOUTH SOUTH, PROYECTOS MONCLOVA is presenting a selection of works by five artists, including: Gabriel de la Mora, Néstor Jiménez, Edgar Orlaineta, Michael Sailstorfer and Anna Virnich. All five artists, while producing widely different work, focus their practice on the idea and physicality of process. The geometric works of Gabriel de la Mora are multifaceted in their subject and materiality. Through his obsessive practice of accumulating and fragmenting pigmented feathers, the artist combines his meticulous craftsmanship with conceptual investigations that result in evocative and abstract configurations. Similarly, Jiménez collects construction materials from houses and projects found in the outskirts of Mexico City as a way of examining the relationship between the processes of destruction, construction, distortion and propagation of Marxist-Leninist thought within social structures in the outskirts of Mexico City. By incorporating the construction materials that are widely used among these low-income areas, the result is a comprehensive pictorial group of work that also absorbs the architectural elements that were essential to these political movements. Edgar Orlaineta’s hand carved wooden wall sculptural works also reveal a knowledge and an intimate contact with the manual process, where what takes precedence over figure and ground is the sensuous matter that transforms intuition into a language. Also working with sculptural wall works is Michael Sailstorfer whose ‘masks’ are sand-cast in aluminum, bronze or iron from quickly drafted cardboard figures in a process that preserves the textures of the humble materials. Lastly, PROYECTOS MONCLOVA presents two tableaus by Anna Virnich. Virnich’s artistic practice focuses on textile-based works, incorporating and layering found fabrics as well as new materials, which the artist stretches on wooden frames thus creating organic and almost painterly compositions that oscillate between transparency and density, foreground and background, agility and standstill. Virnich’s gesture of stretching creates a perceptible tension between the elements: the roughness of a leather-cut-out meets the delicacy of sewn silk.