Carlos Jiménez Cahua
Work from Recent Work.
“My recent artistic practice is motivated by contemplation upon an often-neglected aspect of photography, namely the paper upon which photographs are made—not the type of paper (e.g., matte, glossy, etc.), but rather, the paper as such, cleaved from the imagery upon it. Focusing on the paper as an elemental (rather than incidental) piece permits a heightened negotiation between the materials and the outcome. The work I have been making recently is then modernistic (in the Greenbergian sense) in its conception, insofar as the very variables of the medium bear a significant causational relationship to that which is produced.
More recently I have largely (though not entirely) forgone straight representation in my photography yet still have edged toward the traditional site of photographic making, the darkroom; much of the work can be considered photograms. This return to the darkroom felt necessary to advance my modernistic interests in the medium of photography. Having put aside a faithful printing of the negative has permitted bypassing the regular tendencies of language that typically surrounds photography, namely that based on socioeconomics, journalism, semiotics, biography and psychology, among others, of course.
By the reductive process of making photographic work not functioning as a mimetic index of the real world, and instead (more faithful to the etymological sense of the word, photo-graphy) pursuing the medium as the arrested action of light upon paper, I seek to investigate the visual language of photography, concentrated and independent, a language, I believe, that need not necessarily borrow from the “real world.” In this sense, my recent work is motivated by a formalistic investigation of photography in a reduced form, selectively divorced from straightforward mimesis.
As the role of photographic paper is amplified, so too does its existence in an installed form become even more critical. This has led to a growing emphasis upon installation in my recent work.” – Carlos Jiménez Cahua
