Jaime Velázquez may have been disadvantaged by being born in this time of not too many good artistic arguments. Art is very much conditioned by spurious factors unrelated to what is truly important and caught up in strange circumstances that do little to favour true artists. At another time, without so many elusive approaches, he would have been an artist with very different results. He would have been what his work truly reveals: a great deal of creative wisdom, plastic strength and manifest truth. But the reality is different. The discourse of art is subject to many factors that have an impact on outcomes that are not always clearly conscious.
He was born in 1987 and, judging by his work, he is an artist of consolidated professional practice. With a degree in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Seville, specialising in design and engraving, he is one of those artists who works without any of the exuberance that exists in art and which only serves to cover up shortcomings and focus attention on what is of little interest. He is an artist, therefore, with a clear conscience and great enthusiasm for an art in which he believes. This unjust artistic exercise that elevates those who shout the loudest, even if they say little, is not good for many true makers who remain in the true creative establishment without participating in the corridors where there is more dialectic than good projects. Jaime Velázquez makes it evident that he is a born worker and a permanent fighter in the noble battle of creation at the easel and in the solitude of the studio. His work reflects that he is aware of the modern artistic guidelines and that he knows how to adapt them to an artistic exercise of which he is a wise and courageous executor. Nevertheless, I believe that he is a painter-painter; with a conscious artistic approach, plenty of creative lights and correct plastic positions. In his trajectory there are moments of maximums that denote the good reality of a solvent artist with decisive sufficiency.
Winner of the Gustavo Bacarisas Prize in Gibraltar and present in the always difficult selection for the BMW Painting Prize in the thirty-seventh edition last year, his work is known for appearances in important venues, such as the solo exhibition at the Alfonso X El Sabio Cultural Centre in his home town. Now he arrives at that safe harbour of La Línea, the Sala Manolo Alés, where so many good artists have left their mark. If Macarena Alés, its director, has opened the doors for him, it is because in his work there is sapience, determination and acting solvency. She is not given to mistakes.
The exhibition takes us through various well-planned situations. He is a painter with a sure hand; with a well learnt craft, capable of facing any situation. This is clearly seen in works of well executed concept and resolution, with the figurative reality perfectly conditioned in form and substance. But that is not all. One can observe the qualities of a good painter but, in addition, one can also see that there is a clear questioning of the existence around him, of the environment, of the society impregnated with new technologies that condition the vital discourse. His work is modern, very modern; his figuration is exultant, dynamic, resolute, very well developed so that it is superimposed on the rigid criteria of the eminently real. His powerful chromatic developments open up the perspectives of figuration itself and accentuate a more defining character so that there is a certain distancing from the strictly representational. In addition, he creates experiences of a very well developed abstraction which, at times, assume the positions of these new technologies. Very good are the pieces made with acrylics and oils where this mediated figuration opens up to dystopian positions - 'La fragua de Vulcano', 'La creación', 'Cristo del pago la Alhaja' or 'Primado negativo' - which give way to objects of a disparate extra-artistic nature - 'El último soplo', 'La libertad' - and a strong conceptual well.
The exhibition, well laid out and well defined from a conscious curatorial position - the curatorship of Celia Moro Peruyera provides criteria -, ventures us into a new art, where nothing is left to chance, but rather enters the imprecise limits of a different artistic reality, subject to a universe of different and wide-ranging plastic, aesthetic and conceptual circumstances.
