NEW YORK, NY.- Ruiz-Healy Art is presenting Cisco Jiménez: Paradojas en Frecuencia Modulada (Paradoxes in modulated frequency), a solo exhibition of works by Mexican artist Cisco Jiménez. Cisco Jiménez: Paradojas en Frecuencia Modulada is on view at the New York City gallery from September 10th to November 1st, 2024. This is Jiménez’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Cisco Jiménez creates his own visual language, influenced by Surrealism, Dadaism, and Mexican culture. Jiménez sees himself as both an anthropologist and artist. In his paintings and collages, the artist hybridizes natural Mexican landscape features such as volcanoes and mountains with stereos, vinyl records, cassette tapes, and wires. Pre-Hispanic figures and ancient pyramids intersect with 20th-century boomboxes and turntables, creating a poignant reminder of the blend both cultures have created and are now part of modern Mexican culture. Humor and paradox are constants in Latin American life; Jiménez utilizes his witty humor and a broad color palette to balance the visual action of political criticism and social malevolence that plague the Americas.

In Pirámide del Sonido, 2022, Jiménez’s chromatic devices blend retro and futuristic elements that can be read through many contexts, but particularly through the lens of the impact of globalization and capitalism on Mexican society and the environment. As the late scholar Francesco Pellizzi writes in his essay Hybrid-Hidden Worlds in Morelos: Animation and Artifice in the Work of Cisco Jiménez, “By appropriating the icons and gadgets of the dominant culture, technological and social milieu, he trans/forms them into other realities - those of a “hybrid”- hidden world whose virtual existence unexpectedly blends with that of things we come across every day.”

In the tradition of Mexican popular art, Jiménez uses the word as an educational, political, religious, or commercial element in his works, creating his icons and naming his creations with humorous neologisms. In his 2022 collage, Inconformidad geológica, Jiménez carefully includes text, labels, and drawings, pointing to Indigenous, modern cultural, and social references. About his collages, the artist states, “They create very striking compositions that end up being a type of codex or diagrams, most of the time bordering on the absurd and the Dadaist. They try to explain something concretely and end up being more like the mental chaos each can build in their own mind.”

Alongside his paintings and collages the exhibition will showcase Jiménez’s clay boombox sculptures. Jiménez creates his boombox sculptures in collaboration with indigenous artisans from San Agustin Oapan, Guerrero. Jiménez transforms the boombox, a once highly sought-after piece of technology unattainable to many in Latin America due to economic conditions and reimagines the now technologically obsolete device using clay as a medium. Throughout the exhibition, the boombox serves as a symbol that reminds us to tune in and listen to the frequencies of our current and past times.

Before studying with Bruce Dorfman at the Art Students League, New York, Cisco Jiménez attended the Instituto Regional de Bellas Artes and the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, México City. In 2001, Jimmie Durham invited Jimenez to collaborate at the 49th Venice Biennale. His work has been the subject of over fifteen solo museum exhibitions, most recently in 2022 at the Amparo Museum, Puebla, México, curated by Tobias Ostrander with an accompanying publication.

Jiménez has exhibited widely, including, The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Art
Basel-Hong Kong; Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, KS, Museo Amparo, Puebla, MX and the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC). His work can be found in the permanent collections of the British Museum, London, England; the Isabel and Agustin Coppel Collection, Mexico; The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Art Collection; the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico; the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico; the Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA), Long Beach, CA; the USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; the DeYoung Art Museum, San Francisco, CA; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX, among others.