This book was created in correllation with the exhibition. A colaboration between florencio, Miguel & Maddy

Available at INGA Books (Link)

Available through This Store ( Link )

Alejandro Jiménez-Flores “… for them to endure, give them space” at Bar4000 Review by Gareth Kaye @ Chicago Artist Writers

In the latest exhibition at Bar4000, … for them to endure, give them space, Alejandro Jiménez-Flores’ explorations of time, image, and embodiment, continues through floral imagery and language. The artist also extends their interaction with florencio–a conceptual persona–whose conversations and inquiries with Jiménez-Flores often open new ways through which the artist translates ideas and images through the filters of memory, gesture, and performance.

Jiménez-Flores first began their work with flowers three years ago, beginning with photographs they captured on walks around Chicago. They later noted that the exercise ultimately grew stale, leaving them with a sense of having violated something of a trust or respect shared between beings. Whereas Flores framed the flowers for their own work, the relationship between artist and subject felt too insular. Coincidentally, it was around this time that Jiménez-Flores began to receive messages from friends of the flowers they saw and began to incorporate these images (coming as a form of mediated communication themselves) instead. Using these second-hand photographs, ready-made translations in themselves, Jiménez-Flores could interpret them not only as a form of communication between intimates but also as a passive observer of a photograph.

The pastel image-transfer process that has since become a staple of Jiménez-Flores’ work builds out images and time by simultaneous acts of addition and subtraction. As Flores builds an image, they intuitively select to transfer parts of it to another surface and then continue to expand the initial image afterward. The inevitable unevenness in line, weight, and color leaves behind a series of vestiges and impressions within the process. The transfers soften images like, from a distance (2018), to become out of focus in some parts from repeated transfer, while a certain leaf, stem or edge becomes sharp, and pronounced. The haziness of not only memory, but visual apprehension as well, can be found manifest in the soft glow of the pastel, floating on top of the surface of the canvas like a gossamer.

Jiménez-Flores first used this process in experimenting with images of their friends, and for one of the first times in recent exhibition, Flores has included one of these images, a longing—from a distance—giving space. nathan 6.22.15 (2015); an image, made in the past, presented now, amongst recent works that suggest where the work has been, is now, and a speculation of myriad routes for future explorations of intimacy. Paired with another painting, untitled (frame) – waz, (2014), the inkling of a figure creates an abstracted inquiry: Is this figure someone receding from memory and representation? Or someone coming into being, and only because of their placement and vibration are they out of focus and appear to be on the cusp of legibility? Is this what it means to recognize someone as an equal – as a friend? To care that someone is coming forward and always emerging when there is an option to choose between recession or affirmation?

Given that many of the painting’s titles imply an action or proposition for action e.g., let’s cruise— florencio” borrows from alejandro and alejandro learns from florencio, but they forgot who was sleeping and who was speaking, (2018) – a title that ends with a comma, causing caesura to suggest the potential for more action – if not here than elsewhere, anywhere really. Furthermore, another canvas, florencio’s first hand at cruisin’ (2018), is stacked on top, illustrating the action of the larger image title, all the while building the confusion of position, subject, and subjectivity in the making.

These images do not ask, but rather force a kind of communion between parties. An intimacy complicated by the inability to discern who is speaking, singing, making space, and looking once again recalls Nancy: “It is a real presence, because it is a contagious presence, participating and participated, communicating and communicated in the distinction of its intimacy.”

In a performance that accompanies the exhibition florencio’s first hand at making room 00.06.66, (2018), accompanied by a musical track by Fire-Toolz and a perfume made by Matt Morris, Jiménez-Flores’ conceptual persona florencio occupies the gallery for six minutes and sixty-six seconds. Through participation and cohabitation between the artist, audience, and the deep diffused drone of speakers carried and moved through the gallery by Jiménez-Flores and gallery director Ben Regozin, space and position were put into focus. The audience found themselves sharing the elusive and diaphanous exchange of vision and position with the parties implicated in the paintings, and addressing an entity that emanated from multiple points in time, space, memory, and imagination.

The intimacy of Jiménez-Flores’s practice often betrays the great lengths of collaboration that are necessary to make much of their work. From the production of images that are sent to them, or communication with florencio through multi-temporal spaces and the relationship between each image and its individual beholder reconsiders the triangulation of community. Jiménez-Flores pursues that sense in memories which are never explicit or visible, the unknowable glow of having been there all while being here. The multiplicity of the self into temporalities on the brink of one another, allowing each work in … for them to endure, give them space, fold time into the surface of the image, cloaking and highlighting the traces of familiarity Flores chooses to show in equal amounts. What is shared and what is withheld is a snickering exchange of secrets between unwitting and even unlikely friends.

Alejandro Jiménez-Flores is a conceptual artist. Part of their conceptual framework —friendship?— involves florencio. florencio asked Alejandro to ask Angel Marcloid to use her sound skills —and conjure her Fire-Toolz personae— to elicit the sounds that exist within and emanate from the multi-temporal spaces that florencio navigates (florencio666.wav). In addition to the aural environment, traces of florencio’s previous iterations appear visually in several paintings. One such iteration, waz appears in a piece from 2014 —perhaps “waz” was what florencio once was at one point  —becoming multiple.

While florencio cruises through their multiple temporalities Alejandro goes on a walk —a dérive, and while cruising through their neighborhood on this leisurely walk, Alejandro encounters the same flowers previously sent to them by Ben (the B A R in BAR400) on a summer afternoon —an image of yellow flowers joyously growing tall overflowing a fence. In a new series of works, the memories of this image conglomerates with the memories of that encounter and other walks—dérives— around that same neighborhood, of walking to the flower shop encountering the plant only their aunts had in Mexico (possibly from the milkweed family), the paw scratch marks on the mud, and walking while thinking of proximities, longings, gentle gestures… of propositions of language that are yet to come, giving these gestures space…making space for these propositions to explore their potentialities. Within these new works, there is a horizontal shift, a way in and out of portraiture (for more than 3 years all of Alejandro’s compositions had been portrait oriented). In this gesturing toward landscape, all these memories extend into and embrace an enduring collectivity. And in this cruising with flowers, they aim to deconstruct their subjectivities of themselves, picking up the traces of propositions of a language that is yet to come, always already in the horizon —but perhaps, always already within, so lets give this language space, make it endure, let it bloom…so come and join Alejandro, florencio and Fire-Toolz on this cruisin’ through the traces of ephemeral jouissance that lay in the horizon’s potentiality.

Alejandro vaguely recalls how seven years ago, while enrolled in a philosophy class, they learned that for the greeks to do philosophy was to be a friend of knowledge. Often there was mediator facilitating this correspondence, an already there. In Plato there is Socrates, and in Socrates, there is the Sophist Socrates struggles to differentiate their ideas from. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this already there mediator as conceptual personae. In Alejandro’s practice, there is a conceptual personae whose names are in flux; they are several, a multitude, some aliases they use are tazzy, wazzz, florencio, and ;). Alejandro strives to foster a conceptual environment where this personae can flourish. They represent the minor voices, that small voice in your head that says irreverent things and is often shut off by your bigger voice, repressed. But it’s also already aware of the systems of language that allow it to be.

This personae is the real stage-hand behind Alejandro’s work. It’s a collaboration, they both attempt to “loose the nuts” of systems of subjectification by learning how to coexist with others and each other and asking themselves what it is to write in place of the other, to conjure a language that is not here yet, that exist outside of straight time. Alejandro uses images of flowers and plants that are sent to them by friends. In a double entendre of multiple folds, these images reflect how their friends think of Alejandro, and what reminds them of them. Through these images, they mediate their own subjectivities. The weight of each image is unfolded in several compositions, fading away each time it is transferred, becoming less visible, becoming less subjectified, becoming ground, becoming a gestural trace of sensations and elusive temporalities. These images and means of image making are mediated through florencio and their process-based practice. Traces of the images are reflected in painterly gestures, colors, and lines that eventually mutate to a form that alludes to writing, they write propositions for a language that is not here yet.

florencio wrote on their painting journal the other day:

florencio first try aar writing
florenx first hand at writing
first try at cursive
gets tired halfway
letters can’t convey
glyphs
so colours in between
what’s does ones write about,
when there is just not one thing
what is grammar
that i don’t knows,
what’s is this great order
that doesn’t fits
anst

angst
rraawwww

if i change it
it becomes a bigger machine,
if i don’t i don’t exist
if i make a different machine
it is still a machine
and will eat others
including us

must learn how to make loose the nuts
add kinks to the motions
make rooms inside the machine
to dance
to laugh
to be free
to feels
…

Images of flowers began to appear in Alejandro’s work 3 years ago. At first, Alejandro candidly took these reference images while walking to their studio, but they soon felt uneasy about this act, for it seemed like intruding upon the flowers; framing them and imposing a language onto the flowers that was not their own. Thinking there could be a better language to relate to their subjects (and, in a way, to Alejandro’s own subjectivities), they decided not to take these photos anymore. Around the same time, they started to receive and use photos of flowers sent to them by friends, usually with text (“So happy to have you in my leaf! “). These images contained a softer language and offered an encounter (interweaving) of Alejandro’s personal narrative with those of the flowers.
In a new series of works, Alejandro traces lines from these floral compositions on film and makes stencils by cutting through the lines. Drawing and tracing from these images, they aim to unravel what lies in between the lines: a kind of writing, a correspondence, a longing (“thinking of you”), a conjuring of a language that is yet to be. The outline of a leaf overlaps over a petal, and they begin to communicate, just like in nature when the sun shines on the petals and casts its outline onto the leaves, and the leaves in the shadow (the obscured presence of the sun) feels the transferred presence of the petals.

Furthermore in this show, Alejandro mines images from memory to explore relationships to self and family (both chosen and determined by birth). Alejandro draws from memory the geraniums from their aunt’s garden, where they recall playing with their cousin and collecting dried petals and leaves from the geraniums and placing them into a bucket with water and dirt. Stirring this concoction with a stick, playing witchcraft (“haciendo brujeria”) to conjure up a spell, but what spell? It was probably all gibberish, but perhaps they were already learning to speak a language of flowers, learning from the way the flowers communicate, of pigments and shapes, of color and effect of light, their pure materiality and its exhaustion. Alejandro also recalls when they noticed a small voice in their head, florencio! A conceptual personae, And how in their dialogues they both have been making attempts to break out of subjectification systems by learning how to coexist with others and each other. Asking themselves what it is to write (speak) in place of the other, to conjure a language that is not here yet (that perhaps exists outside of straight time), full of sensibilities and kindness. So florencio asked Alejandro to ask their mother to teach them again, just like when they were a child, how to draw a flower again. florencio also asked Alejandro to ask Matt if he could make a perfume of florencio’s essence and Matt kindly agreed.

So come see and smell (and read) gestural propositions for a new language in flowers always…

😉

https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17857372417371169/

The fleur is the finest, most subtle part, the very surface, which remains before one and which one merely brushes against [effleure]: every image is a` fleur, or is a flower.

–        Jean-Luc Nancy

 The title of this exhibition comes from a paraphrased, misremembered, and appropriately inverted version of the quotation above. To speak of the surface and the softness of contact that is visual apprehension, both Alejandro Jiménez-Flores and Cathy Hsiao create works that take Nancy’s maxim to a somewhat literal degree by placing the flower (fleur) directly to the surface of the image. Whether in Jiménez-Flores’s repetitious and languid drawings and transfers, or Hsiao’s botanically chromatic concrete sculptures, each artist engages the floral image and imaginary as an actant and subject imbibed with memory and familiarity.

In Jiménez-Flores’s work, flowers become media in and of themselves as sensing and sensitive beings whose encounters can become site for communication between intimates, or as a gateway to memory itself. The human experience with the floral for Jiménez-Flores is a site of translation or a type of experience where one subjectivity is channeled through another. This translation is extended into the bedrock of the artist’s practice through complex modes of transfer during the drawing process that involves revisiting, building out, and replicating an image or form asynchronously throughout the process. Across the surface of these images, Jiménez-Flores leaves behind hazy pastel and colored pencil drawings that seem to cling to the canvas by virtue of static electricity. Flowers float, fade, disappear, and reappear with some parts more pronounced than others across the same image but presented differently on other surfaces. Stains from petals and petals themselves peak out from their supports, grazing the ground and blowing kisses at the firmament between surface and visitor. The flowers in Jiménez-Flores’s work asks us to remember and pay attention, to see where and why they hide from us on one side, but show themselves on another, each work presents a different way of remembering not only our own floral encounters but encounters with the work itself across the gallery.

Meanwhile, a series of new cast works by Cathy Hsiao takes up the challenge of memory, communication, and mediation laid out in Jiménez-Flores’s paintings, responding to them with their own challenge. Casting c-clamps, a tool used to hold two things together, are hung directly opposite Flores’s work with the space between the clamps left conspicuously open, holding nothing between it but an absence that seems to suggest something once held, and dimensions gone AWOL. (The gaps actually correspond to the dimensions of the work on the opposite wall). The casts are made from an amalgamation of silicone, concrete, plant matter and dye, redirecting the object from something that facilitates the binding of surfaces to a surface that itself is bound up in its own materials. The object withdraws into itself with gaps of various sizes between their ends demarcating an absence that leaves the viewer looking to fill in the gaps. Hsiao’s c-clamps demonstrate the core function of the image as an absence that communicates, where the lack of a thing in and of itself gives way for its representation, suggestion, and reference. The emptiness of the clamps give way to an embedded sense of memory pushing up towards the surface of image and the tension between the emptiness of the wall framed by the gaps and the petals pushing their way up to the surface of the casts. Hsiao situates much of her own material interests in her familial memory of Taiwanese natural plant dye makers. While not producing dyed textiles, Hsiao has positioned her memory of family traditions into the surface of her sculptural practice where the memory of the clamps and the memory of technique brush against one another between immediate and ancestral temporalities.

 Always Touches on a Flower seeks to eavesdrop on conversations between works through floral mediation. In some small way, the tables are turned, revealing that we mediate with flowers, and they in turn mediate through us. The flowers might be displayed on the walls, but we are all wallflowers.

 Alejandro Jiménez-Flores (b.1989) is a process-based conceptual artist making gestures that occupy the space of painting, writing, and performance. Their practice is concerned with how the language we have, or lack, subordinates our subjectivities, identity formations, and the space we are allowed to occupy. They attained a BFA in Studio Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2012 & a very minor in Poetry from School of Poetics in Marseille France in 2013 ;). They have had recent solo exhibitions at BAR4000 (Chicago, IL), Heaven Gallery (Chicago, IL), and ADDS DONNA (Chicago, IL).

 Cathy Hsiao is an artist working in Chicago. She comes from a background in craft, weaving animal fibers dyed with plants, raised by a Buddhist mother. She has exhibited in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Upcoming shows include Aspect Ratio, and MCAC.

… and so you of course know the journey of the Monarchs, and what it mirrors, what it metaphors. and let me tell you, that perhaps, being told “… you are not a Real Monarch” it’s maybe a relief, i am a monarch with lower case m,
no! ahem!

my name is kiki,
i was one of those butterflies
and let me tell you

i always felt more comfortable, when i was an egg

i could see
i could feel, sense every single part of my body,
moving, forming,
thinking, being
becoming

i went from being one single blob
plop!
and now there was ii (two) of us, a mirror?
an awareness,
a desire to become them,
to absorb them
to become whole again, a longing

plop! plop!!plop! plop!!plop! flooop!!

y esta estrella creció grande,

now that i think about it,
that first plop, might have had a bit of floop
my other me was a bit different i noticed,
and i knew i must be different then

as a caterpillar, i loved gossiping with the flowers,
they are the best,

wiggling through to not get caught in the details,

they let me eat their buds, because they saw i was different, fabulosa!
quizás conspiraban para convertirme en flor,

i heard someone say
you are what you eat!
and i was a flower bud, gossiping with them,

and then one day, i felt the sky not move,
so i hung upside down like a bat
from under a leaf near the bishop’s balls,

i liked that moment of stillness.
for a second i felt what it was like to die
nothing moved
did i die?
ay!
un stomach cramp,
toda la sangre se me subió a la cabeza,
y mi cuerpo líquido empezó a tomar forma
oh mira q piernas,
alas de una nueva colección de gucci
q mi abuelita me mandó en un gene hace dos vidas,

me quede en este tiempo más q los demás.
anhelaba el sentirme así más

because i stayed in that form
longer than others
processing all the secrets the flowers hid in their buds
when i came out of my shell, to spread my wings like a bat
i was alone
and everyone was already flapping about
forming groups
playing games
y yo aguitado (bummed out)
thinking back to that first plop!

i flew and tried to catch up w the group,
when i arrived they teased me for being late,
and someone made a remark that my spots where different,
i told them it was the gucci handbag my nana sent me in a gene two lives ago
ahh es la gucci
jaja ja q gucci q nada
hay este salió rarito, medio extraño.

they had formed roles to perform,
patterns to follow, and i kept stumbling,
it seemed like they were doing it on purpose,
oh kiki, tu no eres una monarca real,
you are not a real monarch kiki!

that’s it
i couldn’t take it,
if i wasn’t a real monarch
then then…

i flew away

missing my fabulous flower friends,
they understood,

how boring would have been to keep flapping like the other Monarchs
i didn’t like their patterns anyways,

stomach cramp,
ay, i have not drunk anything in two days, i was flapping furiously in the opposite direction
and now i’m quivering and disoriented, lost and hungry,
i smelled something irresistible

and the sky stopped moving again,
it looks like it’s coming from a weird tulip
with a stem of water, clear, but not flowing,
in this red tulip (what i thought was a tulip from disorientation)
a pool of nectar,

sip!
gulp!
fling!✨
wow!

esto sabe familiar (y no es una caguama jeje!)
pero nunca lo e encontrado,
un sueño?
un recadito q las flores me dieron?
un hechizo?
probé un lugar familiar, me sentí como el microsegundo antes de el primer flop!

por un segundo me sentí así, y tomé más!
hay que bonito se sentía

this tastes familiar (yet unknown )

a little message from the flower buds,
a conjuring,
a dream
y que es lo q va pasar?
and what’s that you say it’s going to happen! gosh!
i tasted a familiar space
that microsecond before the first flop

oh how fabulous it felt.

i now knew where to go,
that there was a place from where funny looking tulips like this came
a familiar space,

and i took a few more sips!
uy, se me puso poquita borrosa,
my vision go a bit blurry,
the disorientation was still there,
mixed with all this new feelings

my heart beating like a crazy horse
overwhelming (anxiety?)
tranquila…

describe cinco cosas,
el aire se mueve de nuevo,
the sky is moving again,
i feel it caressing my wing,
i am standing in a funny tulip,
me paro en un tulipán cómico
that is true
breathe in
exhale
a book of leaves
un libro con ojalás
que dice
squint
disorientation
ay cabron esta ansiedad me está haciendo una broma,
what the hell! this anxiety is playing a prank on me,
yes i am disoriented, lol no need to let me know through visions,
but then i thought,
kiki you don’t have visions!
thump thump thump Thump

shake my head
squint again
*disidentifications

ohhh! disidentifications! que bonita la foto en ese libro.

suddenly, someone came near,

oMG!
this butterfly is siping on my aperol spritz!
awwww, pipiripheww! snaps a photo

aperol spritz ✨
what a funny name for a funny looking tulip

y el aire se movió y como desorientada, sin querer volé!

and the sky began to move faster this time and
i moved with it,
out of habit,
disoriented, disidentifying
but I loved how i was feeling
all the sensations
i must find this familiar place

i must find this field of funny looking tulips…