Bayrol Jimenez — The Roads of Devotion — Dukan Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 17 → April 28, 2012

Dukan Hourdequin gallery presents The Roads of Devotion, the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Mexican artist Bayrol Jimenez (1984).

While radically disparate, Jiménez’s work is driven mainly by drawing. He has an enormous appetite for paper, covering it most of the time with ink and acrylic paint. The ease of his manner and the freedom of the formal treatment he accords his compositions unquestionably have their roots partially in the Mexican tradition of drawing that’s virtuosic, visually imposing and often marked by frank social commentary; an approach that inevitably conjures up such major figures of the first half of the twentieth century as Leopoldo Méndez (1902-1969) and Feliciano Peña (1915-1982), to name but two.

Bayrol Jiménez, however, doubtless bent on skirting the trap of overt facility, seems determined to push these principles even further, towards a kind of paroxysm that makes saturation of space and the visual field one of its trademarks. […] Nor are the compositions themselves lacking in substance, appearing capable of accommodating mixes, overlays and collisions between varied and, sometimes, contradictory motifs. But this is only a first-glance impression: these tightly interlocking associations of images and ideas let the artist establish narratives and set up genuine scenarios — kinds of pursuit games, almost — which nonetheless tend to prevent revelations that are too direct and immediate, visually or in terms of delivering some message or other. […]

This modus operandi brings us back to Roberto Bolaño: he who in the short novel Antwerp offers a non-linear narrative — fragmented, dislocated, apparently without structure — whose chapters succeed each other sometimes with no clear connection, generating a diffuse sensation, an all-enveloping atmosphere. Here the writer is applying something very close to collage; which is exactly what Bayrol Jiménez does, too.

All the more so that, looking beyond his individual sheets of paper, he likes to think of drawing as a launchpad for extending his practice […] What emerges is an open-ended conception of drawing that blossoms in his installations.