Throughout his career, Jaime Gili has developed the universal abstract language of the mid-20th Century from its Latin-American utopian rubble, into contemporary painting. More specifically, his work has been contextualised as a critical revision of Latin American abstraction, especially the Venezuelan optical and kinetic work of artists such as
Carlos Cruz-Diez and
Alejandro Otero, with an input from what had been left out, popular art and urban energy. The recent history of his native Venezuela has been present in his works in his exhibitions, notably in London at Cecilia Brunson Projects (Guarimba, 2017 and Loop, 2022) and in New York at Henrique Faría Fine Art (The dark paintings, 2018). The Venezuelan poet Adalber Salas Hernández described Gili’s Dark Paintings as ‘a geometry in ruins’. Critic Fisun Guner wrote in 2003 about his show at the Jerwood Space: "What do you get when you mix
Pop Art,
Minimalism,
Vorticism,
Futurism and
graffiti art? The answer may well resemble the work of (...) Jaime Gili." Venezuelan Curator Jesús Fuenmayor wrote in 2006 for the catalogue of Gili's show at Periférico Caracas that his paintings were "as if someone had thrown a bomb at a work by
Carlos Cruz-Diez". Swiss curator Oliver Kielmayer, wrote in 2009 "Jaime Gili seems to combine the wilderness of the jungle with a
formalist and reductionist artistic language; the result is a kind of
Gesamtkunstwerk, a crystalline pulsating organism that almost comes alive." Gili has taken part in several colaborational and experimental projects, such as Caracas:Reset, curated by Rolando Carmona, at
La Colonie (Art Space), Paris in 2018. In 2004 he was invited by curator Paul O´Neill to be part of the experimental exhibition "Coalesce" at the London Print Studio, together with artists
Kathrin Bohm and Eduardo Padilha. The experimental exhibition, "an evolutionary, cumulative, exhibition project", is a research and practice into the possibility of an exhibition as a form of co-production between multiple agencies. The Coalesce series has had seven iterations in twenty years, the most recent one in
The Showroom, London, in 2024. Gili has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including '6 Bienal do Mercosul' in
Porto Alegre; 'Expander' at the
Royal Academy of Arts in London; 'Las tres calaveras' at Periferico Caracas; 'Jump Cuts' at CIFO in
Miami; 'The Complex of Respect' at Kunsthalle
Bern; "Bill at Pittier" at
Kunsthalle Winterthur and 'Indica', a show recreating the 1960s
Indica Gallery at
Riflemaker in London. Other recent exhibitions, in Miami, Caracas and London, he has also been invited to make several permanent works integrated into architecture. In Venezuela he completed "Diamante de las Semillitas", a work in
Petare, a very high density informal city with a colonial core in the East of
Caracas. He was also chosen to create a site-specific design for 16 large industrial storage tanks, in what would become one of the world's largest public art projects . Entitled "Art All Around", the event and work was produced by Maine Center for Creativity. The site is located along the Fore River in
South Portland, Maine. ==References==