Violin music

Rhythm, beat, harmony and metrics are some of the foundations that build music, but that also constitute a primary part of Enrique Jiménez Carrero’s work. His paintings have a paused rhythm, where feelings take place and are swapped, palpitations and memories are regularly repeated in measured intervals of time. His compositions are harmonious, balanced and proportionate, impregnated by a metric that is so well-structured that it seems to come right from the verses of a poem.

This is the reason why music and painting are connected to each other here in an intimate way, as if they were heterogeneous organisms, to benefit and ennoble each other, to favor one another. Although the painter doesn’t just choose any instrument at random, he prefers the intangible beauty of the scrubbed string, making it visible and available to be touched in a tight connection between the instrument and human anatomy. Two surfaces, the one made from fine wood and the one from soft skin, which intermingle, cross and complement each other.

The painter’s mute brushstrokes awake allusive sounds, dreams, longings and memories which are wrapped by the notes of the violin. Calming hues, pressing fingers, the bow rubbing the strings, the strings rubbing the skin… Various visions, different perspectives, the artist invites the spectator to surround the art piece, to listen to it, to feel it. There is dimensionality, texture, naturalness, schematism and audacity in a combination of techniques, chromatism and structures.

And, once again, evocations to the universal world of art. Man Ray’s and Ingres’ shading, as well as the sounds of Vivaldi, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Paganini or Schubert, stroll around the paintings. The memory of Mondrian is interlaced with the hydraulic floors he stepped on in his childhood, the ragged sheets of paper of his memory and the daily codes of the ideas of his creation.

Fernando Talaván Morín