ART-PRESENTATION: Jaime Gili-Guarimba

Influenced by his heritage of Abstract painting, Jaime Gili creates from a sharply South American perspective, adapting this modern visual language to a contemporary context. Gili maintains the Utopian vision for art held by his predecessors, producing paintings that are part study, part tribute and part belief in the social possibility of art.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Cecilia Brunson Projects Archive

Jaime Gili presents his solo exhibition “Guarimba” at Cecilia Brunson Projects in London. The title of the exhibition Guarimba is a Venezuelan word that could be translated as a “makeshift barricade”. Guarimbas were common in Spring 2014 on the streets of Venezuela as a way of protest, blocking normal city life against the regime. At the time, Gili likened the barricades as a response to what was happening in Venezuela, with the paintings that he was producing in London. Gili ́s work inhabits the gaps of the unfinished Modernist project. It is a result of detailed and impulsive bouts of research into the life and work of key Modern architects with the artist constantly adding elements to a very personal language, resulting in spellbinding paintings that reflect a dialogue where truth and fiction interlace. The artist has developed a unique style that represents a distinctive point of convergence between a specific inherited European modernism interlaced with Venezuela’s past historical modernism and current political affairs. Aware that abstract painting cannot place present-day reality on the canvas, for instance, the reality of protests and the disintegration of democracy. Gili takes on these issues through their tempo and the painting’s own slow process of becoming. Thus, gradually and looking within its own limitations, His Abstract paintings attempt to bridge the voids of time and space, the final message being one of a positive future.

Info: Cecilia Brunson Projects, Royal Oak Yard, Bermondsey Street, London, Duration 18/2-18/3/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 12:00-18:00, Sat 12:00-17:00, www.ceciliabrunsonprojects.com