ANTONIO JIMÉNEZ, OR THE DREAM OF SOLITUDE

Where is the man, where the artist? And the man-artist dwelled in his own small, everyday death, and within it he lived alongside his faithful solitude, giving birth to mysteries touched through effort, wrapped in a personal and extraordinarily rich flora, utterly alien to Linnaeus and yet so close to everything he is able to contemplate. Between rage and sweat, between visions, immersed in scarcity, there is born from his ever-living wound of a silent rebel a joyful and complete fauna: the scourge becomes a leaf, the flying amoeba a bouquet, and the heart oozes a strange, hybrid barnacle.

Antonio Jiménez, a painter without a school—and without knowing it—invented painting; all possible techniques—his already immensely rich—were created anew by someone who knew nothing of them. He learned impasto, discovered glazes, and instead of bile pouring from his mouth it flowed from his hand, and the brush gathered it up and it turned green or red or yellow, becoming flower, lace, or monster, all of it gifted to him by solitude… And in the warmth of silence and deprivation, like a vast protest against everything, in the old manor house of La Trinidad, in a livid and cold lunar time, a new world emerges, as if an Andalusian Macondo were coming into being. Jiménez has invented his own myths, and he—who would not know how to distinguish between a phanerogam and a cryptogam—has known how to paint all flowers, because his own solitude, the dream of his heart, revealed the world to him.

Excerpt from the catalogue “Jiménez. The Dream of Solitude.”