Néstor Jiménez: The importance of being self-sufficient

What is the importance of being self-sufficient if not learning to be useful to others?

This is one of the key questions Néstor Jiménez (Mexico City, 1988) poses in his first solo exhibition at Proyectos Monclova. Conscious that the concept of self-sufficiency is in reality a fantasy because it is always in constant tension with independence on the personal level and social codependency, the work Jiménez presents in this exhibition positions itself between these two concepts.

Composed of 28 recent paintings – all works were realized during 2020 – this exhibition converses with certain ideas of the socialist school and the coming and going between the struggle for individual well-being and the common good. In each work, Jiménez represents the diverse ideological distortions resulting from the numerous interpretations of the policies of USSR, reflected in the vernacular architecture of different socioeconomic stages of Mexican history. In addition, the artist takes up certain principles from books such as We build from cardboard (A. Leptev, 1932) and Politecnican Young (N.D Belayanov / V.P Nardashev, 1931), in which the predetermined objectives for the child population of the then emerging dictatorship of the proletariat are evident: teaching trades in a didactic way so that children join the social tasks practiced by their parents.

In the words of the artist, “The importance of being self-sufficient is a space for the historical reconsideration of the convulsive aspirations of human groups that, overtaken by a disastrous reality, opted to dilute and permeate certain practical knowledge through the ‘social ceilings’.”

Néstor Jiménez (Mexico City, 1988), visual artist graduated from La Esmeralda, has participated in several solo and group exhibitions including the XIX Painting Biennial Rufino Tamayo (2020), Museum of Contemporary Art, Oaxaca; Parasitage, ruidos negros, Sixth Edition BBVA-MACG Program (2020), Carrillo Gil Art Museum, Mexico City; I National Landscape Biennial (2015), Carrillo Gil Art Museum, Mexico City among others. Additionally, he has been the recipient of the scholarship for the National Fund for Culture and Arts (FONCA) in 2011, 2015 and 2020; and the BBVA Bancomer Program scholarship in 2019.