In paintings such as Barbaro, Ochoa, and Trikalinou, Jaime Gili incites the austere purity of geometric design with the confidence and authenticity of painterly gesture. Presented in a cluster, his paintings are not hung, but leaned against the wall, creating a temporal architecture inciting of the constant transience and development of urban space. Executed with a palmy palette, Gili’s large scale canvases capitalise on the power of aesthetics to motivate and allure. Bold splinters of pitch black, copper metallic, or tainted pink pierce through grounds animate with drips, smudges, and impassioned swipes, creating monumental fields of raw, potent energy.
Hailing from Venezuela, Gili works from a distinctly South American perspective. Influenced by the sharp geometric angles of 20th c architecture and the sleek elegance of classic automotive detailing, Gili’s paintings disengage the international archetypes of modernism: reflecting instead a localised adaptation of style, where design and its social implications have been internalised and customised to represent a unique national and political identity and cultural heritage. Citing his country’s rapid oil-rich economic growth and intensive South American visionary developments such Caracas and Brasilia, Gili’s paintings address this utopian new world optimism and its inherent failure.
Gili’s canvases are nostalgic for this obsolete positivism; where the idealistic development of public space and the appetite for mechanical amelioration both affirmed and inspired a sense of social buoyancy and community. Borrowing from the Constructivists’s ideas of bridging art and technology, Gili’s shard-like compositions are reminiscent of Ljubov Popova and Mikhaiul Larionov, while simultaneously paying homage to great South American abstractionists such as Cruz Diez, Jesus Rafael Soto and Alejandro Otero.