Eugenio Espinoza on Jaime Gili

Everything is Borrowed. Alejandra von Hartz Gallery. ArtNexus 8 no73 106-7 July/Aug 2009

 

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To paint movement has always been a challenge in the history of art, but it was the emergence of film that stopped, implacably, this contradictory fantasy that today returns even stronger than before, thanks to digital technology; but this time around perhaps as an ideological thing. The Italian Futurists expressed proudly their desire to destroy traditional conceptions of art and appealed to an idealization of Industrial development. Speed was their great Inspiration. Marcel Duchamp was the last painter who, at the start of his career, was able to create a painting beyond the limits previously reached by an artist with Nude Descending a Staircase. His interest in movement helped Duchamp discover the powerful energy implicit in optical movements through electric motors. Movement was also an object of interest for Yves Klein's audacious Imagination, since jumping from his building implies also a form of movement, even if it is a fall. But it was Manzoni who took the idea of movement to the border of the imaginable by painting a line on a roll of paper activated on a drum.

Nobody took the adventure of movement to an unprecedented scale. From Venezuela, he was able to challenge the most complex technology in order to develop monumental sculptures that still retain their futuristic and quixotic character.

It is possible that Otero, who lived in Paris, knew the work of German mathematician Herman Minkowski, who in 1908 called his work Space-Time Continuum, which would later be the basis for Einstein's development of his Theory of Relativity. Otero is yet another paradigmatic artist for Gili.

In these times of an electronic aesthetics, visual movement has become a natural landscape, as have the noises that explode on a daily basis in all corners of the world. Jaime Gili is one of those artists who intend to express the times we live in with great intensity. His interests are not limited as much to the sensation of movement as to the sensation of the explosion of the very support of painting or of the conventional spaces where his works are shown.

Already several decades ago we talked about the aesthetics of chaos theory. Every-thing is borrowed, Jaime Gill's exhibition, suggests that explosion of visual energy; both the works presented and the walls seem to clamor against the space of the exhibition and the continued boredom of art. His panting is based on constructions of plans derived from Russian constructivism, all the way through Cruz-Diez's maximalist vision. These references give an idea of the interests addressed in Gili's paintings, but the origin does not constrain the reach of his possibilities. Something that the great masters of the Twentieth Century did not get to know is digital technology, which seems to offer instantaneous possibilities to the unimaginable.
Speed does not allow for an easy visual record, it is happening or it simply just happened. His works seem radically different from gestural painting, with planes that hunger for action. Perhaps the sensation of speed in Gill is musical in its origin, or what those rhythms generate when they begin to have a social character, something that definitely marked the path of Helio Oiticica, but Gili arrived at that peak through the aesthetics that surrounds the culture of the automobile.

Motorized speed is represented pictorially only through multi-colored planes that, always triangular, generate the sensation of going without a doubt in multiple directions, Gili got his master's degree in Spain, and it consisted of a study of the repetition of images, which is the theoretical support of all movement.

It is not easy to concentrate on the particularities of his paintings, since they seem like appendices to the pictorial extension partially covering the gallery walls, which renders the paintings chameleonic of an echo of visual experience, and, though filled with historical references, they are treated with a degree of detachment and irresponsibility, which opens up into spontaneity and freshness -- in the end, what interests us in art.

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