MI REINO ES OTRO_Santi Jiménez 28/04/2023
Santi Jiménez: self-confessed thief of dixital steroids
In a context in which all actions and creations in the West have been doped for years by dixed steroids, whether we want to be aware of it or not - since "algorithmic archaeology" even exists - we feel threatened and living a new version of Fritz Lang´s 1927 film "Metropolis": we feel a renewed fear of the Machine, which, in a very acrimonious way, is bringing us closer to our already nourished fears.
We are immersed in the midst of the debate on the control of the vertiginous advance of artificial intelligence, worried that this "third industrial revolution" will destroy the form of "democratic" nation-state that we "enjoy".
In the face of the manifesto recently signed by more than a thousand technological companies worldwide to stop the advance of artificial intelligence, Santi Jiménez, like many artists, is making use of this tool.
Our artist, consciously problematizing his artistic activity -which is a constant in his long career- in a time of new challenges to the sacred authorship of the artist in the era of "technical reproducibility" -a term already coined by Benjamin in 1939- presents us with a new mixed work, a "classical auratic" combination of handmade painting with digital painting and machine creation, painting generated by artificial intelligence.
That Santi Jiménez uses artificial intelligence in some of the pieces presented here is a natural process in an artist who has always used, both uncritically and critically, digital tools in his compositions, as one of the many processes he uses in the creation of his work.
In "Mi reino es otro", the artist goes through a series of algorithms to compose some of his works, creating conscious ambiguities between digital and manual work. To the manual design, the one created without digital interfaces, the artist contrasts other forms of design with the aim of revealing the prejudices associated with this art as an artistic expression, for example, the one that defines it only by the technique it uses, not by its conceptual values that, each time, expresses an authentic work of art.
Santi Jiménez could have been an opportune creator of NFT´S, but he decided not to opt for this path, because he considers the exercise of art as something that goes far beyond its direct conversion into an economic asset. He criticises NFT´S for their speculative nature, as they function as metaverse currencies and as merely formalist products in many cases.
Santi Jiménez, a member of "Generation X", but "naturalised" as a digital native, creates pieces based on postmodern strategies applied to the image that are already academically accepted, such as pastiche, appropriation or different ways of drawing at the beginning of his career, taking photographic images as a base and very often debossing, but always using the internet as one more source from the immense archive of images and references on which he bases his work.
He uses all the culture created around drawing, such as the universe of digital or mixed manual illustration, comics, graphic novels and also the vast field of animation to create internal tensions in the images he generates. Instead of focusing on the representational character and the univocal message traditionally ascribed to drawing, the creator generates a work that never answers us the first time, nor in the same way. A work that is always a question.
Drawing is soon placed at the centre of its plastic action, both in its conceptual and pragmatic meaning, with all the debate that this entails: drawing as a sketch or as a final work, drawing as popular art or as great art?
As I perceive it, Santi Jiménez understands drawing as a "problem" and as a horizon of creation: he boldly explores the confusion between the traditional praxis of drawing, by hand, and digital retouching. He reflects on the obligatory historically narrative character of drawing when his works are never narrative. He contradicts the pretended modesty of drawing as a minor technique, playing with large formats in his work. He rejects the purely factual character of drawing as an illustrator of a superior idea, when in his work the idea has to be inferred by the drawing itself and makes us think about many more prejudices surrounding this millenary means of expression, warning us of the danger of interpreting images literally.
For a long time, his works were compositions populated by juvenile and adolescent figures who showed us their intimate life, their joys and sleeplessness, in a timeless space, turning the spectators of the pieces into involuntary libidinal voyeurs. Over time, this gallery of characters was essentialised to create compositions with monumental, isolated figures, more cryptic and evocative of deep and transcendent thoughts. At this point we witness a mental "striptease" as obscene or even more so than in the works of the previous stage. But, although we witness this or other changes, all, absolutely all the characters created, always, and up to the present day, constitute visual heteronyms of the artist, similar to his present experiences.
With "Mi reino es otro" (My kingdom is another), the artist gives his work a new formal and conceptual turn of the wheel, surprising us with polyptychs in which the human figure is barely represented. He presents us with a kind of bas-reliefs in the form of friezes of drawings printed on wood which, at times, make some pieces stand out from the mural canvas. There are no frames. The work expands through the perceptual space of the viewer.
Moreover, the images are created from a fantastic iconography, with the aim of suggesting a sort of epic that two people fight, and from which they emerge victorious.
The formalisation of the pieces is radically different from that of his immediately preceding work: it is full of colour, there are temporal contexts, the aesthetics of the work is very different from that of his previous work.
From new discoveries in the complex universe of the uses of drawing, the result of the great research work that the artist carries out for each of his exhibitions, this exhibition is born. "My kingdom is another" is imbued with a deep emotional charge that is cooled by the artist´s already legendary sarcasm, applied to everything, to everyone and everything, but, above all, to himself.
Monse Cea
Art critic and independent curator
FANZINE/CATALOGUE "My kingdom is another"
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