Carlos Jiménez Cahua
Monday, 8 July 2013
Work form his oeuvre
“I have been engaged in structuralist investigations in photography (both digital and analog) as driven by an abiding interest in the image and the material carrying that image. Analog photographic work has involved the making of cameraless photographs (which could be termed “photograms,” but I find that term imports certain aesthetics and bodies of work I don’t necessarily find myself akin to). My making these prints comes from treating the paper not as a passive surface waiting for images or imagery, but rather, as an agent unto itself, whose own material particularities (specifically, its rectangularity, color gamut, and compliance to folding and shaping outside the plane) bear a significant causal relationship to the final product. With this I’d hoped to achieve two things: firstly, parse an un(der)-explored visual language unique to analog, photographic paper (which, generalized, is in some sense a Modernist endeavor), and secondly, highlight the materiality of an often ignored aspect of photographs, namely the print, or made less specific, its objecthood. Analogously, I have inhabited a similar structural conception in working with digital images, whose innate lack of materiality has been of particular interest, and whose electronic, literally code-based structure seems like a fertile, if rigid, ground to explore.
Most recently, I’ve migrated some of my formalist, Modernist and Structuralist interests to other media, like sculpture, video, projection works and paintings. This impulse has come from, among other things, realizing that my interests have lately evolved out of being specific to photography, thereby de-justifying my allegiance to that medium. Working in these media that are new to me has also allowed me to lean on previous vehicles of interest in artmaking, particularly the power and failings of our mind’s perceptive apparatus, the use of color, particularly the saturated primary colors, and finally an attraction to the rectangle.” –Carlos Jiménez Cahua