By 
Between the Lines…
With this small format, Jiménez Rojas makes a radical aesthetic and philosophical choice. He turns his gaze away from the wild, overwhelming nature of the great tropical narratives and focuses instead on lived reality. Unlike explorers or conformist painters who seek to capture the lush exoticism of the jungle or the sublime power of volcanoes, the artist chooses a familiar stretch of coastline. His is the gaze of an intimate witness, for whom Costa Rican nature is not a spectacle but an inhabited world.
By painting outdoors, as close as possible to his subject, he imposes an ethic of proximity — nature is worth painting not because it is extraordinary, but because it is the stage of everyday life. An organic realism, defined by the perfect accord between the individual and his territory, through which he frees his country’s art from external academic influences.
Armed with his canvases and pigments, he roams the dirt roads of the Valle Central, the esteros of Puntarenas, the villages asleep under the Pacific’s white heat. Nicknamed the “plein-air painter,” this artist trained in the school of the outdoors understands, before anyone else, that the soul of a people lies precisely in the quiet of ordinary days. It is a Costa Rica seen from within, by someone who loves deeply what he looks at.
By drawing his subjects from the heart of his own social and geographical existence, Jiménez Rojas unknowingly lays the foundations of a national pictorial identity.
