Plant Material/Movie Collection

A sense of curiosity and growth radiates from the work of New Haven based artist Noé Jimenez. Jimenez works intuitively and quickly to produce mixed media collages, paintings and sculptures, which he sometimes arranges into room sized installations. This series began when the artist received boxes of family photographs from a relative that date back to the Dominican Republic in the 1960s. Having used up the personal archive, Jimenez has moved on to working with a variety of scavenged materials, including paper, wood, foam, found photographs and VHS tapes.

Jimenez works on the surface of his studio floor, often squatting like a farmer tending to his crops. He works everyday and produces small canvases in volume in order to generate a large group of automatic gestures, color relationships and forms. In some cases, Jimenez will isolate and extract a mark from a small work and repaint it in in a larger painting.

Jimenez alternates between these quick small paintings and larger paintings. Both body of works flicker between pure abstraction and figuration—here, a sculptural red painting and a relatively flat portrait of a man hang side by side. While these pieces are largely made from mixed media paper collage affixed to foam, Jimenez has begun to explore the potential of working on rectangular VHS covers, an aspect that lends to the name of this series.

Noe Jimenez lives and works in the recently opened West River Arts Studios in Westville, CT. He graduated with a BFA in Painting from Paier College of Art in 2012, and has studied painting at Colegio de España, Salamanca, Spain, University of Urbino, Italy and Altos De Chavon, Dominican Republic. In 2014 he was a resident at Norðanbál on Hrisey Island in Iceland.