Jimena de la Mora

Ambar Quijano presents Fragments of relating, a solo exhibition by Jimena de la Mora.

Fragments of relating unfolds through the language of painting, in works where the composed stillness of portraiture and considered arrangement of objects meet us head-on and echoes a way of seeing that is personal and unhurried. Though the pictoric traditions referenced have long been associated with entry into intimate or private spaces, the portraits and still lifes gathered in this exhibition feel distinctly imbued with a vulnerability and sensuality that allows for raw or embodied encounters.

Within this tension between inheritance and contemporaneity, painting remains central yet becomes increasingly entangled with personal history and a subtle but persistent dialogue with the immediacy, voyeuristic gaze, and performance of the everyday inherent to social media.

The pieces borrow, whilst simultaneously challenging, not just compositions but behaviors from the digital. The cropped frame, the close-up that implies touch, the casual staging that is anything but accidental. In a translation of intimacy and relational dynamics into image, a nightguard sits next to a vibrator and lube; a lover’s hand is rendered with the tenderness of brush and memory; and a candid portrait mirrors the angle of a photograph snapped while reclining in bed. Painterly tradition, in this sense, becomes a point of departure.

—Ambar Quijano