Infinito

The deliberate ambiguity of the minimalist images of David Jiménez (Premio Fotógrafo Revelación PhotoEspaña 99) is also a declaration of principles. His photographs have no obvious point of interest but seem to enjoy a code of complicity, which is only transmitted to the viewer after a long period of observation. Photographs concealed behind visual lapses which become hypnotic when least expected. Photographs that supply no evidence but whose ability to evoke endows everyday things with a poetic aura.

In his work we find an insistence on looking at the edge of our attention, an ecstatic gaze which finds fascinating elements in the most banal scenes. His images arise from the quiet voice of silence. Taken one by one they seem haphazard but his work as a whole displays a private syntax which is coherent and recognisable. Time is not mentioned, but its absence changes the scenes he photographs into visible mutations of memories. Memories of instants, of real or fantasised experience, represented eliptically.

The process of production of his images is the result of a profound knowledge of the nature of photographic language. His personal aesthetics sublimate a large part of the evolution of photography over the last 30 years; from the formal hermeticism of Robert Frank’s polaroids and the post-beat poetry of Bernard Bernard Plossu to echoes of the best of Ralph Gibson in the seventies. He has given up the descriptive vocation of photography to illustrate the innermost strata of the human being in an unassuming fashion. His photographs are a subtle exercise in constant introspection, fluid and de-dramatised, in obvious tune with the uncontrollable nature of feeling.

David Jiménez uses a medium as tautological as photography to form a semantic loop which puts it at the service of the representation of the intangible. The fragility of the messages contained in these images is really the invisible structure he uses as a starting-point for the construction of other universes. Because, in the end, all his photographs talk about him, describing him metaphorically and in parallel enabling us to recover those fragments of our own recollections which the hierarchy of memory has displaced to somewhere apart from our consciousness and from our verbal descriptions.

Alejandro Castellote.