In Cruz Jimenez’s latest exhibition Among the Shadows the artist adds grist to the mill by exploring the themes of despair, love, death and joy. These are extremes that I seek to capture. It is here “among the shadows” of thoughts and action that I discover a life line of light that comforts me in this gloom.
Jimenez merges the genres of painting and photography with a number of acerbic works such as Frail Duration. Photographed surreptitiously by the artist in 1991 in his parent’s living room, the black and white photograph has been both manipulated and subtly painted over. Although strongly nostalgic, the particular past (and indeed the particular present), hinted at in the work seems indeterminate. The very nature of time becomes elastic, as the evocative and beautiful foreground fades out of focus, while tendrils of paint waft up the surface overlaying the dominant images. The carefully chosen and manipulated objects are loaded with symbolism. A rose, book and crystal dish in combination with the indistinct light and reflected shadows, work metaphorically as symbols of the stretching, rebounding and merging of the past with the present. Concepts such as ephemerality and permanence, life and death, desire and rejection, suffering and happiness, age and youth are implied as functions of both a real and a sought after world.
The title for the show is significant, as it reminds us of the way we live our lives “among the shadows” of our past; a past full of inevitable contradictions from which we can never escape.
View exhibition »