For this exhibition, Bayrol Jimenez chose to find his inspiration in Mexican tradition. Apart from the religious images, there is now a new type of mural paintings, the mission of which consists in promoting a business, embellishing a store… To bait the customers, the business owners reproduce the most popular figures of the modern Mexican culture on their façades: celebrities, heroes of telenovelas and cult movies, advertisement characters, etc. These images, showing a real cult of the beautiful and healthy body, are hand painted by amateurs, which makes them awkward and creates a shift between the intent and its making. Unintentionally, these chance artists, parody the stereotypes of power and richness by the treatment they lavish on them.

Taste Rico is an expression used in Mexico, mixing Spanish and English. It means that something tastes good (for example, a taco « taste rico ») but also points out a rich person. It is mainly used by the « chicanos » or « ponchos, » these immigrants tirelessly making round trips between Mexico and the United States and thus, mix both languages. To illustrate this expression, Bayrol Jimenez chose to reproduce a photograph found in a magazine: it represents a couple kissing greedily. The universe of the magazine, be it fashion or scandals, interests the artist for the distortion of reality it offers: perfection of the body and richness on the one hand, sordid events and violence on the other; an absurd and excessive prism with a considerable influence. The drawing also echoes the above-mentioned mural paintings: executed in a deliberately clumsy way, on paper and with bad quality paint, he celebrates the amateur painters of the streets of Mexico. His exhibition will take the form of large mural drawings that will integrate paper painted with ink and acrylic.

« The ease of his manner and the freedom of the formal treatment he accords his compositions unquestionably have their roots partially in the Mexican tradition of drawing that’s virtuosic, visually imposing and often marked by frank social commentary […]Bayrol Jiménez, however, doubtless bent on skirting the trap of overt facility, seems determined to push these principles even further, towards a kind of paroxysm that makes saturation of space and the visual field one of its trademarks. […] Nor are the compositions themselves lacking in substance, appearing capable of accommodating mixes, overlays and collisions between varied and, sometimes, contradictory motifs. But this is only a first-glance impression: these tightly interlocking associations of images and ideas let the artist establish narratives and set up genuine scenarios — kinds of pursuit games, almost — which nonetheless tend to prevent revelations that are too direct and immediate, visually or in terms of delivering some message or other. […] ». Frédéric Bonnet, extract from a publication accompanying the exhibition The Roads of Devotion at the gallery Dukan Hourdequin, Paris, from March 17 to April 28, 2012.

A limited edition of BAYROL JIMENEZ is proposed by les éditions BALLÉOR : Election, lithography on paper, 40 x 40 cm, 30 copies at 70 euros each (without frame). Please contact us at starter@lastation.org ; +33 (0)4 93 56 99 57 ; or feel  free to come and visit us at La Station, 89 route de Turin, if you want more informations.

Pictures of the exhibition