La Lentitud de las Piedras Exhibition

The program of the Martín Chirino Artistic Residency, Creators 2022, exhibits the results of the second edition of this call. The residence, convened on February 28, this year extended the geographical limits to the entire national territory, in line with the vocation of the sculptor for his Foundation, "from the Canary Islands to the world." The 2021 edition and Cristina Ortega's 'Transeúntes' project have traveled nationally and internationally.

This year, Salvador Jiménez-Donaire presents “The Slowness of Las Piedras”, a research project that “proposes artistic praxis as a means of recording time. Through a minimal but invasive action, the works presented become a sort of “temporary diary”. This mark-making process is configured from the notions of patience, duration and continuity.” The proposal consists of various sculptures in blue and pink alabaster and various paintings on Japanese paper. In the case of the paintings, the support is intervened with gesso and pigment glazes (extracted from semi-precious stones such as sodalite), generating a dense pictorial space in which hundreds of drypoint lines are manually drawn. In the case of the group of sculptures, the surface of the blue alabaster (the presence of this coloration is particularly singular due to the unusualness of its finding) is sanded by hand in a slow and strenuous process that requires physical and mental perseverance. On the already polished and smooth surface, and with the same material as the one used in the described paintings, a dry point, the pattern of perpendicular lines is incised in the rock.

The methodological premise is simple: each incised line embodies time and effort. Thus, the "reading" of the works would encourage perceptive and cognitive rest: "blank time".

Artist Profile

Salvador Jiménez-Donaire (Seville, 1994) is a visual artist and pre-doctoral researcher hired at the University of Seville. He has been selected to hold individual exhibitions at national and international institutions such as the Colegio de España in Paris, France; the Antonio Gala Foundation, Córdoba; the Tomás y Valiente Art Center, Madrid; the Chapel Room of the University of Murcia; the Torreón de Fortea in Zaragoza or the exhibition halls of the Cathedral of Cuenca. He has participated in international group exhibitions at the Museo Etnografico di Udine, Italy; the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, and the Ruskin Gallery in Cambridge, England. At the national level, he has been selected, among other contests, in the IV Edition of the Loyola University Artistic Creation Contest 2022, the IV Andalusian University Biennial of Contemporary Plastic Creation at the Valentín de Madariaga Foundation; the XII Prize of Plastic Expression UNED of Barbastro; the XXXVI and XXXVII Youth Art Exhibitions in La Rioja; the Alonso Cano Prize for Contemporary Artistic Creation - University of Granada 2020; Open work. International Prize for Plastic Arts Caja de Extremadura 2019; the Ibercaja Prize for Young Painting 2019 or the Juan Francés National Painting Prize Fira d ́Agost 2019.

He has received artistic residency grants at the Antonio Gala Foundation for young creators, Córdoba; Caravanserai Residency, Cambridge Artworks, England; and in the historic Madrid Student Residence. He has been awarded, among others, the National Prize for Plastic Arts University of Seville 2019, the Young Painting Prize of Granada 2021, the XXIV Mainel Foundation National Painting Prize 2021 (accessit) or the XXVIII Art Nalón Plastic Arts Contest ( Special mention). She has recently obtained one of the Pilar Juncosa and Sotheby's Scholarships and Awards sponsored by the Miró Mallorca Foundation.

Graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Seville (Extraordinary End of Degree Award; Collaboration Scholarship in the Department of Drawing from the Spanish Ministry of Education and Culture; Royal Maestranza Award for Academic Excellence), Master's Degree in Research and Creation in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid (Excellence Scholarship; Best Academic Record) and Master's Degree in Graphic Techniques (MA Printmaking) from the Cambridge School of Art – Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, United Kingdom (Mention for Excellence - Distinction).

He currently enjoys a PIF pre-doctoral research grant at the University of Seville, where he develops his research and teaching work in parallel to writing his thesis, which is articulated around the acceleration processes characteristic of contemporary societies, the densification of the iconosphere and the time-perception binomial. He has received pre-doctoral mobility grants to carry out research stays at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne in Bordeaux, France, and the Université du Laval in Québec, Canada.