Jungle

Henrique Faria is pleased to present Jungle, Jaime Gili’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Centered primarily on works from his Monte series and featuring one painting from his Black Paintings series, the exhibition brings together a group of recent works that deepen Gili’s longstanding exploration of abstraction as a site of tension, movement, and transformation. The title, Jungle, operates on multiple levels. It is, in part, an homage to Wifredo Lam, whose work remains a touchstone for any imagining of the tropical, the psychic, and the political within modern art. But here the jungle also emerges as a broader metaphor for the condition of the present: a world marked by density, fragmentation, volatility, and excess; a space where beauty and threat, vitality, and confusion, coexist. In this sense, the jungle is not only landscape, but atmosphere - an image for the complexity and instability of contemporary life. This resonance is powerfully present in the paintings from Gili’s Monte series, which form the core of the exhibition. In these works, his angular and layered vocabulary expands into compositions that suggest overgrowth, terrain, camouflage, or visual interference, without ever becoming descriptive. Shapes collide, overlap, and fracture across the surface, generating a sense of compression and release. The paintings seem to grow outward while simultaneously resisting resolution, as though form itself were being tested by the conditions around it. Gili has long developed a visual language that draws from the legacies of geometric abstraction while refusing its more stable or utopian premises. His paintings do not seek purity. Instead, they embrace interruption, rhythm, dissonance, and flux. Structure remains essential, but it is continually pushed toward disorder, reinvention, and instability. In Jungle, that tension becomes especially charged. The pictorial field feels alive - dense, unpredictable, and in constant motion. Born in Caracas in 1972 and based in London, Jaime Gili has built a practice that engages the histories of modernism in Latin America and beyond through a distinctly personal and contemporary syntax. His work draws energy from architecture, landscape, memory, and urban experience, activating abstraction not as a closed system, but as a living field of negotiation. In Jungle, painting becomes an image of our moment: layered, seductive, fractured, and difficult to fully grasp. At the same time, the exhibition gestures toward another genealogy—one in which the jungle is also a symbolic and art historical space, charged with hybridity, resistance, and imagination. Gili’s paintings inhabit that space with force and intelligence, offering a vision of abstraction that is as rigorous as it is unsettled. Jaime Gili (Caracas, 1972) studied at Prodiseño in Caracas where he received his foundation equivalent in 1990. Gili has also received a BA from Facultad de Bellas Artes at the Universitat de Barcelona; a MA at the Royal College of Art, London and a PhD in Fine Arts at the Universitat de Barcelona. Throughout his career, Jaime Gili has developed the universal abstract language of the mid-20th Century into contemporary painting. More specifically, his work has been contextualized as a 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 popular art and London's energy. Gili has had many solo shows such as Small Fonts, Area, Barcelona (1995); Cutouts, Hockney Gallery, London (1997); Go Faster Stripes and Other Modernist Myths, Gallery Westland Place, London (2000); Screen, the Mosaic building, Miami (2005); Jaime Gili makes things triangular at Riflemaker, Riflemaker, London (2006); Coda, Oficina #1, Caracas (2008); Bill at Pittier, Kunsthalle Winterthur, Zurich (2009); Jaime Gili Afuera, Periférico Caracas (2010) and Guarimba, Cecilia Brunson Projects, London (2017). Gili has also been featured in group shows including the Biennal d’Art Contemporani Català, Barcelona (2000); Is It Any Wonder, Galeria Palma XII, Barcelona (2001); The Bold & the Beautiful: New Art from London, traveling show in London, Melbourne and Hobart (2003); Budget Bureau, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Genève (2005); Desconfía, Oficina #1, Caracas (2006); Vila Jelmini: The Complex of Respect, Kunsthalle Bern (2006); Jump Cuts, the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami (2007), among others. Gili lives and works in London.

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