Néstor Jiménez
The Blue Noise Spectrum

In the work of Néstor Jiménez, the city is not merely a backdrop, but a living entity – an organism whose surfaces absorb political struggle, collective memory, and the material residues of ideology. Across painting, installation, video, and collage, Jiménez approaches the urban landscape as both archive and actor: a terrain in which histories of labour, housing, and political aspiration are inscribed into concrete, pigment, and reclaimed materials.

His practice is object-based yet, conceptually driven. As the artist explains, ‘I conceive of my painting as the result of a conceptual exercise – one that emerges from complex social phenomena. It contains a series of meanings. The existence of the object is important.’ In Jiménez’s work, matter itself becomes historical evidence. Concrete, salvaged wood, and construction debris – materials drawn from everyday housing on the outskirts of Mexico City – form the literal support for some of his paintings. These substances carry with them the ideological and social ambitions embedded in the architecture of the twentieth century: dreams of modernization, collective housing, and political transformation.

The formal language of Jiménez’s work often recalls the angular dynamism of Mexican muralism, particularly the polyangular spatial strategies developed by David Alfaro Siqueiros. Neo-brutalist architectural forms dominate his compositions, rendered in a restrained palette of blue ochres as shown in this exhibition. Buildings appear anthropomorphic, as if endowed with bodily presence. Walls bend, towers lean, and facades become figures – suggesting a city that observes, remembers, and responds. In these images the urban landscape becomes sentient: a witness to political history and social contradiction.

This dialogue with muralism is not purely aesthetic. Mexican muralism emerged in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution as a state-supported project intended to reshape public understanding of the nation’s past and future. Monumental murals transformed public architecture into sites of historical narration and political pedagogy. Jiménez revisits this legacy critically. While the muralists sought to construct a unified national narrative, his work probes the fractures within collective memory – particularly those linked to leftist social movements that emerged in the eastern periphery of Mexico City during the late twentieth century.

In his Las celebratorias de Victor Sotelo (Kobolt. Version 1) series the character which is manifested from the various elements of architectural detritus becomes animated, but at the same time is wrested from the very material conditions that produced him. Seemingly entertained and entertaining, this performative levity is undercut by a latent menace. The tools he carries are no longer neutral instruments of labour; in his grasp, they are transfigured into emblems of power. The hammer, in particular, ceases to function as a utilitarian object and instead operates symbolically, evoking the ideological weight of socialism and its historical entanglements with labour, struggle, and control.

Ultimately, Jiménez treats the urban landscape as both canvas and subject: ‘The idea is to give the works a symbolic dimension in terms of their materiality; that is, for me, each material represents something in its historical condition and, of course, a social and class practice.’ Through distorted architectures, reclaimed materials, and references to the muralist tradition, he constructs a visual language in which the city itself appears to think, remember, and testify. His works do not simply depict political history; they materialize it – revealing the built environment as a repository of collective memory and unresolved ideological tension.

The exhibition is curated by Dasha Vass