Néstor Jiménez

In paintings, videos, and installations, Néstor Jiménez engages with his local surroundings in order to access the histories of evolving ideological landscapes that are reflected in the changing living conditions at the urban periphery. Collecting construction materials like concrete and steel, Jiménez repurposes material traces of these histories, harnessing their symbolic power as supposedly transformative substances central to an unrealized expansion of social housing in the twentieth century. Jiménez paints directly onto panels of reclaimed metal and wood, and builds layers of collaged materials that evoke the makeshift construction methods used in building provisional housing. Incorporating stylistic distortions and iconographies of Soviet-era socialist propaganda, Jiménez’s architectural renderings expose divisions of class, culture, and geography embedded in the built environment.