For Pete Jimenez, shopping for ideas means going from one junkshop to another. There he finds the perfect stress-buster to his day job, a chance to transform scrap metals into pieces of art. He demonstrates this again in Lost and Found Objects, his second one-man show at the West Gallery in SM Megamall, from October 17 to 29.
Jimenez opts to make smaller pieces but the craftsmanship is just as clever. Jimenez says that the objects themselves lead him to the final product. “Sometimes [the execution] can be very spontaneous. Sometimes it can take me weeks [to finish].” Using a uniform 4” x 12” metal plate as canvas—preparing it just like how a painter prepares his canvas—Jimenez breathes new life to what people ordinarily see as discards.
With his advertising background, Jimenez works like he is creating a storyboard. This time with less of the mental stress that he usually encounters at work, and he calls it his “personal project”. Jimenez actually looks forward to the weekends, when he can go back to his collected scrap metals and resume welding. In “Frame by Frame Treatment I and II,” he saw that each frame was rich with possibilities, putting together different objects of varying shapes and sizes.
“501” came from discarded railroad nails and formed to look like the trademark pair of jeans. Then there is sushi, inspired by the Japanese delicacy. Jimenez took this idea farther to form what looked like Japanese characters in “Turning Japanese.”
Ideas just come rushing to him when an object fuels his imagination. His friends already know that he likes to play scavenger and often inform him where he can get good materials. “I get objects that excite me,” says Jimenez, when he is literally shopping for scrap. It’s Jimenez’s gift that he can picture at once a finished work even with just one piece of metal. There is one named after his dad, “Pedring,” for it looked a caricature of his old man. He also tries to virtually tap on his ear for music by creating “Symphony in G”. In “Amen” is a man on the cross. “Robocop” was pieced together from industrial materials that Jimenez got from Meralco.
Jimenez loves the challenge about making these objects useful again, retooling them into something totally different from what they were originally. He keeps his sketchpad by his side always so that he can work on a composition at any given moment. He says it is a welcome breather from the confines of his Optima Digital office, and it helps in keeping his mind refreshed. Sculpture allows him to play around a little bit more with ideas and he isn’t afraid to make mistakes. “I am not limiting myself to my sketches. For me, the more spontaneous the work, the better.”
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