Carlos Jiménez Cahua
Carlos Jiménez Cahua has been engaged in structuralist investigations in photography–both digital and analog–as driven by an abiding interest in the image and the material carrying that image. His analog photographic work has involved the making of cameraless photographs (which could be termed “photograms,” but the artist finds that term imports certain aesthetics and bodies of work he doesn’t necessarily find himself akin to). His making these prints comes from treating the paper not as a passive surface waiting for images or imagery, but rather, as an agent unto itself, whose own material particularities (specifically, its rectangularity, color gamut, and compliance to folding and shaping outside the plane) bear a significant causal relationship to the final product. With this Cahua hopes to achieve two things: firstly, parse an un(der)-explored visual language unique to analog, photographic paper (which, generalized, is in some sense a Modernist endeavor), and secondly, highlight the materiality of an often ignored aspect of photographs, namely the print, or made less specific, its objecthood. Analogously, he has inhabited a similar structural conception in working with digital images, whose innate lack of materiality has been of particular interest, and whose electronic, literally code-based structure is a fertile, if rigid, …
Carlos Jiménez Cahua has been engaged in structuralist investigations in photography–both digital and analog–as driven by an abiding interest in the image and the material carrying that image. His analog photographic work has involved the making of cameraless photographs (which could be termed “photograms,” but the artist finds that term imports certain aesthetics and bodies of work he doesn’t necessarily find himself akin to). His making these prints comes from treating the paper not as a passive surface waiting for images or imagery, but rather, as an agent unto itself, whose own material particularities (specifically, its rectangularity, color gamut, and compliance to folding and shaping outside the plane) bear a significant causal relationship to the final product. With this Cahua hopes to achieve two things: firstly, parse an un(der)-explored visual language unique to analog, photographic paper (which, generalized, is in some sense a Modernist endeavor), and secondly, highlight the materiality of an often ignored aspect of photographs, namely the print, or made less specific, its objecthood. Analogously, he has inhabited a similar structural conception in working with digital images, whose innate lack of materiality has been of particular interest, and whose electronic, literally code-based structure is a fertile, if rigid, ground to explore.
Cahua has had solo exhibitions at Samsøn in Boston and Anastasia Photo in New York. His work has been included in group exhibitions at the East Wing Biennial at the Courtauld institute of Art in London, Artspace in New Haven, University of New Hampshire Museum of Art in Durham, Hap Gallery in Portland, SPACES in Cleveland, and Open Space in Baltimore. His work will be included in the forthcoming. He is one of the founders of kijidome, an artist-run space and collaborative in Boston.
Courtesy of the artist
