Néstor Jiménez

Through seven works in different formats—easel painting, collage, ceramic sculpture, kinetic sculpture, and mural painting—Jiménez traces a story that is familiar to him: key milestones in the life arc of a working-class man. The exhibition takes the ambiguous phrase “One Among Millions” as its title to account for what Jiménez calls “the epic of an ordinary man.”

His epic—intimate and tender—is also an essay on a vulnerable, fluid masculinity, caught between the living conditions produced by the industrial capitalism we inhabit and something else yet to be defined. Although both are marked by systemic inequality, the latter is associated with the dematerialization of sources of labor through the platform-based service economy, from delivery workers to the growing disappearance of skilled labor—the “ordinary man” Jiménez refers to—supplanted by artificial intelligence.

It is at this moment of transition that Jiménez’s works invoke the persistent materiality of things by engaging recycled and construction materials such as cement and plywood. The use of industrial materials and the spatial infrastructure of forms created through a brutalist reinvention of the urban environment link his pictorial work to the techniques of David Alfaro Siqueiros’s polyangular muralism. In these works, Jiménez revisits the contradictory reflections inscribed in Mexican muralism on political ideology, class, and access to social well-being, now approached through the clarity afforded by that which is both personal and political.

Uno entre millones is part of a series of commissioned exhibitions that, since 2024, has focused on young creators whose practices expand artistic languages and media from a perspective that critically examines the social structures that perpetuate inequality and dominant hegemonic positions.

Curated by: Lucía Sanromán

— MUAC