La couleur est partie. Elle s'en est allée, expulsée. Loin, elle parcourt d'autres compositions, se mêlant aux formes, aux traits, s'arrêtant là où on veut bien l'accueillir, là où elle peut stationner. Pourtant on l'aime bien la couleur. Quand elle arrive avec ses touches colorées, en dansant, quand elle vient en musique, les cheveux dans le vent, on la veut. Mais quand la couleur surgit de nulle part, quand elle s'arrête ici ou là, quand elle s'installe près de compositions sédentaires bien ancrées, alors là, plus rien ne va.
The paint's gone. It went away, it was driven away. Far away it travels through other compositions, mixes with forms, features, stops where we want to welcome it, where it can settle. Yet we love colour. When it comes with her colourful touches, its dance, when it comes to music, with its hair in the wind, we want it. But when the colour emerges from nowhere, when it pauses here or there, when it settles down close to established seated compositions, then nothing works properly anymore.
The French/Spanish artist Gabi Jiménez is known for his colorful paintings, which he creates in his own style borrowed from comic drawing. But there are also many monochrome black-and-white works among his works that capture the artist's pictorial ideas in a particularly pointed way. The exhibition BLACK & WHITE is dedicated to these works: Graphics, comics and also works on canvas. The reduction of color allows the artist's graphic ingenuity to emerge even more clearly. His black and white is by no means monotonous, or the black and white of today's political discourse.
With an ironic twinkle in his eye, Gabi Jiménez's black & white also means the encounter of Roma with non-Roma, the black, the Kalé with the Whites, the Gadje, unfortunately often associated with difficulties and violence. Gabi Jiménez, like his late brother in art, Damian Le Bas, to whom we dedicate this exhibition, meets this with the means of Dadaism. The Gypsy DaDa was a new term that the two artists coined during their memorable joint exhibition „Gypsyland“ at the Kai Dikhas Gallery in January 2012 and they also manifested it directly in a major joint work exhibited in this show. Gypsy DaDa owns a biting and disarming humor that counteracts the seriousness of oppression and racism.
In this exhibition we encounter a trademark of Gabi Jiménez, small symbolic caravans that wind their way through the pictures: in the picture "Viva Parisse" around the Eiffel Tower and in the piece "Black Caravans" through barbed wire. Also we meet grim hedgehogs. These stingy-armed yet peace-loving mammals who are often associated with the Roma tradition as the "niglos". With Jiménez they become icons of a Roma resistance which knows how to resist a whirlpool of barbed wires, of violence, even a Fin du Monde, an end of the world as we know it. Jiménez also recalls Federico Garcia Lorca and his assassination by Falangists in 1936. Lorca, the Spanish poet who was more connected to the Andalusian Gitanos than anyone else, in a poem by the artist published in a book accompanying the exhibition, looks at black ants at the moment of his death, which also run through the exhibition as a motif. Jiménez makes the dying Lorca think in this surreal contemplation: "The Gitanos are immortal. The Gitanos are like my brothers. I know - I am convinced - that the Gitanos are immaterial. Hence the flamenco! It is good to be Gitano! It is good to be immaterial! The Gitanos never die because they are above horror!"
Gabi Jiménez is one of the central artists* of the minority who have helped the international artistic movement to succeed since the first pavilion of the Sinti and Roma in Venice in 2007, "Paradise Lost", which also presented Jiménez's work.
Moritz Pankok