Lyrical Abstraction

From the compositional and thematic structure of the landscape, the artist proposes an overcoming of the genre in its condition of transcription of reality, in favor of an evocation of contents linked to a wider symbolic repertoire. The lyrical component of his work and, of course, the technical and material aspects linked to the tradition of painting make this suggestion of elements of the referential world unavoidable, so there will not be an extreme search for non-representation, as it was for other Venezuelan artistic groups. On the contrary, much of the attribute of his work will consist of that inevitable power of reminiscence, and the inevitable link between a supposedly significant autonomy of the plastic elements and the associations that the viewer can invariably or need to establish with material and symbolic reality. The direction of his painting will be marked by the influence of Serge Poliakoff, especially by the "landscapes" elaborated in great and pasty planes, which, according to Dore Ashton, allow him to capture the rhythms and structures of the landscape, to be submitted to the rules of abstract composition (Ahston, 1958).

In his informalist period coincide, on the one hand, the purely abstract continuation of his work in Paris and the United States, and on the other, the force with which these expressions of what was called "new art" burst in Venezuela. Precisely because it is an artist whose European transit was made under the so-called Paris School, and especially Nicolas de Stäel and Serge Poliakoff, it is possible to see in his canvases of this stage a constructive presence at the bottom of his expansions of matter and color, which will gradually disappear to throughout his production.

Informalism

In the early 1970s, Jaimes Sanchez again abandoned the use of referents in his painting, so that the viewer could establish associations through his perceptive experience. It is a stage of profound introspection in which the absence of recognizable objects of the material world does not prevent the symbolic link with the landscape genre, but this time with a constructive freedom and a power of evocation such that it influenced the convenient title of Psychological Landscapes. In this case his painting assists in the re-encounter of the road traveled from his first stay in Europe, thus merging on the canvas the contributions of the lyricism of the fifties, the material research of the sixties, and a greater sense of the risk of maturity achieved as artist. The presence of all these antecedents based the compositive efficiency of the work on the resulting tension of all the forces that were put into play, as can be seen in the subtle balance that sustains pieces such as Paisaje mural I and Paisaje-loma. Part of its mystery is due to a sort of conscious automatism that persists in its language.

Psychological Landscapes

From 1985, Humberto Jaimes Sánchez returns to face in his work with the material world of the objects, and in particular to investigate the associations with the landscape that his painting has maintained since the fifties. The constructive component observed in the layout of the color and matter planes of his previous stages serves as support for the figurative display of houses, ranches and mountains, which although they were suggested remotely in his previous painting, are now integrated into the plastic universe created by the artist. When integrated, they produce an unusual harmony and a defiant balance that, as well as it refers to the enchanting imperfection of naive art, likewise speaks to us of the mastery of Jaimes Sánchez in the use of color and in the creation of transparencies that destabilize the architectural sense of his painting. Works such as Paisaje de la subida and Poblado de la carretera make it possible to verify a relationship with the world of figuration, which does not detract from the pioneering background in the practice of non-representative languages that define the trajectory of Humberto Jaimes Sánchez in Venezuelan painting. At the same time these aspects account for the sense of artistic risk that the author was able to assume until the end of his days.

Oblique Villages