roy exley on jaime gili

Roy Exley on Jaime Gili

Go-Faster Stripes and Other Modernist Myths

The postmodern project was apt to deconstruct modernism, derailing it and then dismantling its basic precepts, leaving a dismembered skeleton for the hyenas of cultural criticism to pick over. Currently there seems to be a new interest abroad in the resurrection of modernist concerns, or rather a re-construction of modernist aesthetics in a contemporary context, a tendency which might justifiably be called the NeoModern.
Go Faster Stripes is a collection of work by the Venezuelan-born artist, Jaime Gili, which refers to modernist motifs and their scattered traces. Not derived from modernist art, but rather from modernist design, with its whole tranche of technological and commercial connotations, these paintings have a stripped down look that suggests a slick aerodynamic urge towards speed.
The custom-designed speed stripes and bars which adorned 70's motor-coaches and street cars signalised a need for speed, or at least its impression. The French cultural commentator, Paul Virilio, has written in depth about the influence of speed and its lure, on the course of modern history - speed has often been achieved as a by-product of the development of war machines and the accompanying advances in technological sophistication.
If war then is the culmination of the modernist project, one of its more bizarre spin-offs has been the urge towards speed for speed's sake - a trend capitalised upon by American designers such as Raymond Loewy, who designed streamlined bullet-shaped steam locomotives for American railroads, and, subsequently the dragster or formula one racing car.
Slick steel was subsequently supplanted by the super de-luxe faststripe paintjob, whose parallel stripes simulated speed. it is those paint jobs that symbolize and denote the craze for speed, that are the inspiration for Jaime Gili's paintings. Some of his works refer directly to customised car doors and motor-coach side panels, the sight of whose designs kick-start little twitches of cultural memory - recalling the phenomenon of boy-racers and their Ford Cortinas, or Escorts, with their inflated pretensions and wheel-arch bubbles. Here we have speed symbolised to such a degree that it becomes myth, visual effects which only maintain their credibility through a contextualized history of that bravado and showmanship - currently termed 'machismo' - that dates back to the phenomenon of tribal markings in our hunter-gatherer days.
In his later paintings, Gili's references become more oblique, these hard-edged abstract works, are hybrids which have evolved from the memory-traces of painted autos and their parts, bold blocks of colour, with the mere suggestions of speed and its aesthetic corollaries. These later works, on MDF supports, lean against the wall at louche angles, as the designs derived from consumer products revert to objects once more. They take on a life all of their own, re-constructing an aesthetic long swallowed up by the scrapyard, long lost to the embrace of use value. The forms of Gili's works, both painted and sculptural, are, ultimately, re-affirmations of a lost aesthetic through a new -found trajectory.
We are reminded of the work of the American painter, Ellsworth Kelly. However, whereas Kelly's work may have been parodied by postmodernist artists, here, Gili, a Neo-Modernist, parallels Kelly's iconic style through an oblique re-working of both commercial and street-based visual devices.
The pivotal theme here is speed, which has now taken on a different significance, of course, it now has less to do with optimum distances covered in the shortest space of time, than with burgeoning volumes of information transmitted and received in the most condensed formats possible.
The information we gain from the visually cryptic graphics of Gili's concise and minimal paintings is a compressed array of traces and bytes whose references to speed are at a double remove from sources of origin. Offering neat metaphors for our changing relationship to speed, his paintings bring subliminal details of a manic world whose subtleties often pass us by blurred by that same speed.
The Italian Futurists, Boccioni, Marinetti, Balla, & co, are inevitably associated with a painterly depiction of speed , their works exhibit a whole selection of stretched, blurred and disjointed images which stutter and slide their way across the picture planes. Unfortunately, these works have been tainted by fascist connections. The Italian fascist party championed the access to the power of speed that these paintings brought, and the power that the mechanisation of speed accessed, was of course a fatal attraction.
Marinetti invented the 'warrior dandy', who "survived and savoured in battle the power of the human body's metallic dream". The fantasy of speed is an irrevocable part of the modernist project. The cleansed, streamlined forms and profiles that informed not only vehicle design, but also architecture, which was often realised only in the realms of fantasy such as in the paper architecture of Antonio San't Elia.
There were other, less controversial artists who were aligned with Futurism, as well as writers, particularly the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa, who poignant writings brought some sanity to the Futurist movement, moving it away from its Fascist connections.
Speed and time are closely linked, of course, as measurements of achievement, and they become ever more critical in an age that increasingly gives credence to the measurement of their effects as their justification. In his book, Speed and Politics, Paul Virilio, states, "Olympic records first progressed by hours, then by minutes, then by seconds, then by fractions of seconds, the better they performed, the more pitiful were the advances they obtained, until they could only be noticed electronically". When street racers reached that point where an increase in speed was no longer an option, then their vehicles were made to look faster rather than to go faster, and the slick paint job became a surrogate for the real thing, until through its almost baroque over-elaboration, the 'go-faster-stripe' became its own parody.
Gili's tryst with speed is on a much more subtle, oblique level. His images symbolise speed, merely through the way their forms reference automotive decoration. His works elevate this incidental and ultimately overlooked automotive paint-jobs, into almost monolithic, self-referential objects. His bold blocks of colour energise these paintings, creating a dynamic which is barely controlled by the solidity brought by their juxtaposition with black, a solidity above which they would otherwise float. His references to speed are purely symbolic and without a prior knowledge of their referents, their relevance is lost. The acidic colours, which inhabit Gili's paintings, belie the industrial pragmatism which is their source, breaking this incongruity, on the part of the viewer, requires a therapeutic flexing of the imagination.
lf we find ourselves analysing Gili's painting on a purely aesthetic level, we are left searching for solutions to conundrums of our own making, because, in the final analysis, his work transcends the purely aesthetic and plumbs that sea of cultural memories and ideas upon which the work of many contemporary artists floats. His iconic use of colour and form is so emphatic that it defiles any attempt to label it reactionary an occupational hazard experienced by the contemporary painter - but any affinity with hard-edged abstraction of the 70's and 80's is only superficial, and any such comparisons must be dismissed as misplaced. The references in his paintings, while not obscure, nevertheless demand a certain amount of work on our part, an input for which we are handsomely rewarded.
lf we were to view these works in isolation we might be justified in thinking that they are the product of a custom-car fanatic or more accurately an 'auto-freak', given that the American influence is obvious in the polarised eclectical dynamic of his work. This American saint seems even more pronounced in his recent 'RE' series, where we can detect shapes and forms which suggest a milieu of the early rocketry which was centred on White Sands test range in Nevada. it was here, under the guidance of the ex-Nazi rocket scientist, Werner von Braun, that the wartime V2 rocket was developed and extended to help realise the American dream of space travel - another example of the exponential acceleration of technology accessed through the through the vicissitudes of war
Jaime Gili picks up, in his work, on our fascination for the 'moving object', and particularly our nostalgia for the details of its evolution, the automotive projectile acting as a precursor to the more ballistic phenomenon of the guided missile, which, despite the pejorative connotations of its name, is as much to do with extending and pushing our civilisation onto new levels, as it is to do with destroying it. The essential paradox in his work is his use of traditional, lo-tech media to access and depict cultural phenomena, which are highly technological in nature. Just as Pop Art used the language of commercial graphics to get its message across, Gili's work uses the language of graphic design, with its clean, hard-edged demeanour, to convey his personal orientation towards the inherently sham world of the 'go-faster stripe'.
Just as we increasingly scan things to gather their messages, or take sound-bytes, here, these traces and fragments of the world of speed seem to be gathered at pace and are as minimal as their brief glimpse allows.

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