“Vulgar Display” is a deep dive into the memory and identity of the city of Cali, seen through the introspective and multifaceted gaze of artist Edgar Jiménez. The exhibition invites you to take a tour that intertwines Jimenez’s formative days as an artist, his journeys from south to north summarized in logbooks of drawings, the personal and the collective, the past and the present, the urban and the intimate along with daily diaries that until recently rested at the bottom of a drawer, creating a visual mosaic that captures the complexity of a city in constant change.
Jiménez, who grew up in Cali during the hectic decade of the 90s, witnessed the rise of drug trafficking, the emergence of new technologies that redefined the social and cultural fabric of the city and the cultural boom of Caliwood,1 the golden age of Cali cinema. This contact with the Cali Caicediana,2 allowed him to have a different reading of his city, where what happens outside the movie theater –real life– could be subverted and become as exciting as fiction, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.
1 Caliwood: Term referring to the cinematographic boom that the city of Cali experienced during the 1970s and 1980s, a period in which important filmmakers emerged and films were produced that left a mark on Colombian visual culture.
2 Cali Caicediana: Refers to the literary and cultural universe inspired by the Cali writer Andrés Caicedo, who, through his works, captured the essence of youth, culture and urban life in Cali in the 1970s. His vision has influenced multiple generations of artists and writers.
Jiménez critically explores the themes that have marked Cali, such as the reinterpretation of the murder of a black soccer player, which he transforms into a newspaper cover, following a similar gesture he had already made with the figure of Pambele. In addition, he collects audio from local radio stations and mixes them into sound mosaics that become auditory landscapes and invisible drawings, capturing the cacophony and frenetic pace of urban life. In his works, the narrative unfolds through a technical eclecticism that includes painting, graffiti, muralism and comics, although this eclecticism is not chaotic; on the contrary, all these forms of expression come together in a coherent narrative that reflects the complexity of his artistic vision. This approach gives rise to stories such as that of a paper dog that crosses neighborhoods in search of its owner, symbolizing the places where Jiménez grew up and the emotional connections that tie him to his hometown. These personal narratives, together with elements of popular culture and collective history, are intertwined in a complex multidimensional fabric, where “Gótico tropica (tropical gothic)” emerges as a motif that defines a generation that faded away before reaching its prime, but still peeks through the cracks of the old republican buildings drawn by Jiménez in his youth.
It is impossible to separate Jiménez’s work from his daily life; his work is a direct extension of his personal experiences, his journeys through the city and his intimate relationship with the spaces he inhabits. Throughout his career, Jiménez has maintained a constant line of research: connecting, moving and displacing, linking nodes of memory that form a visual log of his experiences. This approach is reflected in each piece, where art becomes a living testimony of his journey through a city that continually reinvents itself. This exhibition does not only stop at the surface of the city; it invites us to read Cali, to discover its hidden stories and to reflect on the relationship between what it was, what it is and what it could be in the future. In every corner of his works, we find a city that resists being forgotten, that remains alive in the ruins and in the memory of those who inhabit it. For Jiménez, what is beyond the city’s mere appearance is what really matters: the layers of history, the characters and the places that, despite the passage of time, remain present in the collective imagination. Vulgar Display is, in essence, a portrait of deep Cali, a city that has shaped the artist and his work, but that has also been shaped by him. Through his pieces, Jiménez proposes a visual dialogue between what was, what is, and what is to come.
3 Gótico tropical: A concept that describes an aesthetic that fuses the exuberance and warmth of the tropics with elements of darkness and decay. It is a term used to characterize certain artistic expressions that explore the contrast between the vitality of the tropical environment and a sense of melancholy or decay.
