My last journey

Enrique Jiménez Carrero’s life is characterized by the movement, the path, the passage and by the journey. His eyes opened up to the light between the walls of Granadilla, where he spent his first few years among gardens, humble people and cobblestone streets. But his story is also the chronicle of an uprooting, where this time the liquid element didn’t come to offer life, but instead to flood his memories, his past and his identity. But like the painter himself says in these wise words: “Granadilla wasn’t drowned by the swamp, it was drowned by tears”. Thus, his first trip was forced, not voluntary, and this fact would irrevocably seal his biography and by extension, his artistic creation.

Although what the water took from him, painting gave it back, since that first path taken took him towards exploring a means of expression that would allow him to find himself again after all he had lost and to come to terms with all that he longed for. And he was able to find that language in art, where from his first strokes Enrique would dive into his memory with the purpose of keeping it there, offering him the place he should never lose. This fact drove him towards trapping time into his canvas, creating evocative, dreamlike and sensitive images in a cosmos where black and white photographs, old toys, used pencils, tiles and slabs, notebook pages or ragged sheets of paper help us travel to the past and invite us to ask ourselves questions, to talk to the enigma, to feel with proximity, to adjust our sensitivity and to be moved.

His synthetic vocabulary is still a constant in his work and has achieved the most complex part, to generate his own standard and to establish identity codes that allow us to recognize his paintings under any kind of context. Nonetheless, it has not ceased in the evolution of his language making way to new paths, exploring new creative ways, moving forward to new forms. This exhibit is a perfect example of this, where there is space for the oil paint, the mixed technique, the sculpture, the augmented reality, collaboration between artists, the most realistic figures, the illusion, the abstraction, the purity…

As a child adopted by the city of Plasencia, this artist, a pilgrim of emotional patterns, offers in this exhibit a project that he has generously given to the city, an epilogue of his wide and recognized trajectory, with an amazing visual potential that culminates in what he himself calls
My last journey..

Fernando Talaván Morín

These words remained in J. Carrero’s memory when he was only 11 years old and had to leave his village, Granadilla, because a dam was going to be built there.

Seeing the tear-filled eyes of his neighbors and relatives for having their home taken away from them, have marked the style of the great universal painter who imbues his works with emotion, transmission and beauty.

Since that day he sensed that he had the talent to tell with his hands, what his eyes and heart saw, as a resilient journalist who knows the responsibility of taking care of the divine gift of moving us with his creations, without wanting to reach everyone but marveling those who appreciate his works.

The feminine expression, the choice of colors, the tile, even the music that I imagine when I see each painting, are a constant enjoyment for the senses.

More than four decades and countless awards endorse an impeccable career recognized worldwide, but above all the human quality of a man who wanted to give image to the feelings of his loved ones and his own.

Frida Kahlo wrote a phrase that would define Carrero’s feelings: “I tried to drown my pains but they learned to swim”.

Dear Enrique: Blessed pain that you have transformed into a working tool to heal with your work. Because for me, your work is undoubtedly healing.

Diana Navarro

Multidisciplinary Artist