"Memento Mori" - Oil and gold dust on compressed cardboard (traditional technique)
Ojolois the artistic pseudonym of Abel García Jiménez, a Mexican visual artist who navigates the borderlands between introspection, digital mythology, and symbolic perception. His work unfolds through a visual language that merges traditional craftsmanship with generative technologies, creating pieces that serve as mirrors, codes, and rituals of contemporary consciousness. We caught up with the artist to discuss his practice.
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Abel, thank you for taking the time to speak with Occhi. Before you called it “art,” was there a moment—an image, a wound, or a silence—that first taught you how to see?
Absolutely, the inner emptiness, just as a canvas I started to paint in my dreams. And when I was awake, the silence and loneliness were all I lived in high school, and for many years after. I know that this would sound like a cliché, but my baby face never helped me with the girls; they bashed my brains in and stepped on me like an ant. All that unbearable charge of emptiness led me to live inside books, images, music, and misanthropy. I constructed a whole universe just for me, I was my own god, light and darkness inside of it. At the halfway point of high school, when I was on my way back home, I decided to make a stop at a famous Mexico City South Mall. I went to a plastic art materials store that I had seen several times. I bought some oils, brushes, and a big piece of illustrator cotton cardboard. That afternoon, I started to paint as if I were possessed. Since then, I knew what “ART” meant to me and its real definition: life itself.
Which early mentor taught you something you later had to unlearn—and how did that unlearning change your work?
What a fantastic question! I don’t really know if, fortunately or unfortunately, but all my mentors are mostly so very dead and great artists, some Mexicans, some abroad, and by the way, not just strictly visual, but a bunch of writers, musicians, filmmakers, and architects. I’ll start with those universal artists: Gaudí, Dalí, Klee, Tanguy, Gargallo, Chillida, Buñuel, Kubrick, [who was more Mexican than Spaniard or French at the end]; Poe and Melville in my most recent childhood; between the big Mexican icons are García Márquez, Juan Rulfo, Borges, Ibargüengoitia, María Izquierdo, Orozco, Diego Rivera, Siqueiros, Juan O’Gorman, Tamayo, Juan Soriano, Matías Göeritz, Abraham Zabludovski, Pedro Ramírez Vázquez, Teodoro Gonzáles de León… the pleiad of names that are mentors to me is a long list.
But above all of them, probably my only two living mentors I’ve learned from are my mother and my spiritual brothers of life, one is Alfonso Pérez [a respected political and social communication advisor], and the other, who died some years ago, Carlos Carrillo [production manager from whom I learned almost everything I know about audiovisual production]
Now, about the core of the question, I can say that all of them, dead and alive, known in person or not, taught me to explore, to dive into all sorts of knowledge and art expressions, math included! [yep, to me maths is art], to expand my horizons, to see beyond what was in front of me. All those years of enlightening experience not only reshaped my creative work but also transmuted my vision, opened the door for me to construct my own universe and its big bang: ojolo.
Your practice merges traditional craftsmanship with generative technologies. Where do you draw the ethical line between authorship and authorship-by-system?
I’ll start my answer with a quote that is attributed mostly to Picasso, but as far as I know, the core of the concept was expressed before by T.S. Eliot and possibly another English writer: “Los buenos artistas copian, los grandes artistas roban” [“Good artists copy, the great artists steal”]. History, not only in art, teaches that we as a species have evolved through iterations, successive approximations, and trial and error. Actually, nature works in that way. Don’t get me wrong, I’d never justify plagiarism. My point is that when we take great ideas, even if they have remained in the dark or forgotten, and remix them, applying our own concepts, dreams, or thoughts, we are using the evolution system itself as part of our DNA; we take the big or small inputs [size doesn’t matter here!], We analyze and synthesize them to get a different output. I don’t have any doubt that the great art masters would’ve used all the advanced methods and technological tools at hand to create and recreate their masterpieces. Every inventor, scientist, and every creator is a conqueror; they push the limits of the known ‘world’ and themselves to reach new planets, new universes, so to speak, but always re-taking others’ previous accomplishments.
About my creative process, it starts with my child’s obsession with the eye and the sense of sight. I spent hours inside the books’ illustrations, encyclopedias included. I have the burning iron mark of semiotics in my soul and my mind. Under that logic, my subconscious gathered all kinds of images and visual experiences, those of mine and from others, not only near to me, but creators from all areas and activities, dead and alive. All that raw material in my head was transmuted into synesthetic -I learned that decades after- dreams, very vividly, that I keep them as memories of life, I mean as lucid experiences. Finally, all this complex process inside my head resulted in the compelling necessity to recreate, reimagine, and reconstruct art itself, but from and through the eye. Ojolo is my great architect; he’s the compass, the captain, the director, and the navigant of all my artwork, even before he appeared in my life as creation. My ultimate art proposal is to contemporarize as many visual expressions as I can, re-engineer art to bring into the light the invisible of the visible.
The gaze as resistance: If the gaze can wound and heal, when do you weaponize it—and when do you refuse it?
The question strikes my very foundations as an artist, but more importantly as a human being. Semiotics above semantics, but both with the same strength, have the power to move people. Now, the gaze is the means that connects the outworld with our emotional states and landscapes. The gaze is that threshold between consciousness and the subconscious, but it is the bridge, the machinery that turns what our senses report to the brain, into the weapon that wounds or the medicine that heals. Words are images too, in that order of ideas. When we read, speak, or listen, we connect words into images, even if we talk about abstractions, like immaterial concepts, music, or science. Here in Mexico City, we have a particular and, at least for me, one of the most important museums: the “Memory and Tolerance Museum”. There is a brutal statement in a section called “Las palabras pueden matar” [“Words can kill”]. The reference to propaganda and words is palpable throughout our history.
You can see it with only a single scroll on cell phones, or for those who still buy physical newspapers, books, or magazines, in streaming content, films, advertising, or any other audiovisual media; horror or beauty can be built, art is no exception. Of course, that doesn’t happen immediately; it rises like a silent tide. Let’s not forget all the radical and fundamentalist movements and governments, images and words came before horror and terror, these last two are not the same. Let me put it this way: images and words can’t hurt or heal by themselves; that is the process of communication that makes one or another possible. You need three key components for that process: the sender, the message, and the receiver.
When you have those three, inexorably, we are talking about inputs and outcomes. In that way, a gun or a knife, just like a pencil or a pen, only kill or heal when there is a subject susceptible to it; they are means to produce an effect. Then, what about the gaze and the art as resistance? Art by itself means nothing if you don’t have someone who can be touched in their mind and emotions; it is only when art takes place. That’s why the gaze in the visual arts is a powerful resistance resource. It is, by all means, a life support, also for blind persons, because the gaze belongs to the human brain, and that is exactly why we artists have a huge responsibility.
You’ve said your masks dismantle identity rather than hide it. What part of yourself has a mask revealed that you couldn’t access directly?
Most possibly my ‘mascarojo 45’. Inside consciously and subconsciously, that mask shows a contained fierce I’ve lived with for almost all my life. Somehow, a sense of social responsibility and the fear of making the conflictive situation I’m exposed to, something bigger that ends in catastrophic results. Because even when there have been a few occasions I’ve let that anger come out, and in my experience, the conflict not only grows, but gets to the verge of going out of proportion, which could end in a tragedy. I restrain myself, not to explode, because that demon turns me into a different and unknown creature to me. Once the inner war broke out, a perfect baroque drama painting could be photographed. I fear for my life, and who pushed that hidden button that brings out my worst version. In that sense, my “mascarojos” series is meant to be designed to connect every spectator with a specific mask, and when that might happen, more than just lay eyes on the artwork, the moment would become a mirror that uncovers some darkness of and for the spectators brought to light. A kind of approach to the “Johari’s Window Model”.
Lyrical and brutal: When a work feels too lyrical, how do you invite the brutal back in? What’s your process for courting friction rather than harmony?
Let me take a “semiotic reading license”. Most of the time, that content, expression, or behaviour that seems to be innocent, naïve if you want, hides an obscure intention, lie, or omission, whether it is spontaneous or premeditated, and vice versa, something that looks mean turns out to be a good intention. Such contradictory situations reflect the human drama of friction and harmony. You may find goodness in hell and evilness in heaven. If that sounds to you an obvious truth, we say in Spanish “Verdad de perogrullo”, I have the better example in the religious paradox of God and the angels’ rebellion conducted by the archangel Lucifer [Spanish word] or Luzbel, both meaning comes from the latin “lux”, both meaning and the best approximation to “light bearer” or “the most beautiful of lights”, an allegory between the olimpian gods and the human kind. I’ll try to explain myself in simpler words -hopefully-, in my understanding, dynamics in engineering refers to the branch of mechanics between the motion of bodies and the forces that cause it, that balance is what makes it possible to sustain and let a structure of any kind, live in opposites: friction and harmony. Epistemologically, it is called, as long as I remember from my MBA bachelor studies, the opposites synthesis of dialectics.
In a culture flooded with images, what criteria do you use to decide an image deserves to exist?
That’s something I can’t decide; that call only belongs to people. On the other hand, as an eye and as an artist, I gave birth to images that come from my dreams, my joy, my pain, all of them products of the perspective that has come from my life experience. Once an artwork has seen light, it has a life of its own, and I can’t decide where it impacts, what gazes will strike, or what path it will follow. Indeed, as I have affirmed, we are a global society where sight is the emperor’s sense, inside and outside of the collective mind. All that noise that comes from everywhere, content to be consumed, advertising, and propaganda, leaves no room for a lot of visual content and, above all, art.
Unfortunately, even when I have extensive academic and professional experience in advertising and marketing, all my efforts, like a bunch of other artists, emerging and professional, cope with what is called a “red ocean”. In that line of ideas, I use all the knowledge and tools at hand, academic and from professional experience as a creative director and audiovisual production manager, to generate strategies to find the breach to get a positioning as an artist and a brand, no easy work for anyone in any field, in truth.
I try to learn as much as I can from other visual artists’ experiences: painters, algorithmic, digital, AI, filmmakers, architects, interior designers, illustrators, even writers, musicians, and composers, and all those whom I’m unfairly forgetting now. Despite the harshness of the question, in a good sense of the expression, all I’m compelled to do is keep creating. In the end, it is not up to me to judge what image deserves or not to exist, or is worth being seen. It’s like images decide by themselves to live or die.
Your releases act as narrative portals. What story are you refusing to tell right now—and why does that withholding matter?
My answer will be as hard as the rightful question. For at least 30 years, I’ve lived with two definitive decisions: not to have children and end my life by my hand, in short, suicide. I have fulfilled both; the first because I always took strong discipline about sex and the use of contraceptive methods as a man, never took for granted the care that my partners assured to use, along with that, I never married, and I could be vasectomized more than a decade ago, that was because physicians act like fathers and think you never know if that decision is for real, sorry.
About the second point, my answer will be as honest as this profound question deserves. For decades, I lived with a definitive darkness that led me to attempt ending my own life. I did cross that threshold – I died and was brought back. That experience became the ultimate narrative portal. Every day since has been borrowed time, and every artwork carries that weight of rebirth. Each piece contains the semiotics of transformation – from death back to creation. Some have told me my art feels rigid, perhaps because it holds this tension between endings and beginnings.
This is the story I’m both telling and withholding – visible to those who can read the signs, invisible to others. It’s not about the darkness itself, but about what creation means when you’ve touched the absolute void and chosen to return to make something powerful enough to capture the gaze of the public and reflect back their own gaze. Maybe it’s what I don’t realize, despite, and paradoxically, I’m an eye. That’s the withholding matter I’m revealing now, and more simply than that, I’m not that important, and nobody asked me before.
You’ve engaged audiences across festivals, workshops, and installations. What is something a viewer taught you about your work that your studio never could?
That in the end, all my creations, any creation, any story, great or small, finished or ongoing, are meant to be forgotten and to be nothing but cosmic dust, noble gases, and water steam floating along the universe. That may take thousands of millions of human years, but unfailingly, that will happen. So, as we live and know life through our senses, and we build the “universe” from that parting point, life and the universe take place inside every human soul.
I’m not special, I’ve never been exceptional, what I have and still create is what matters, not for myself, but to deliver a nano-piece of joy and light to any gaze that is willing to see my work. My affirmations have no relevance at all, only that we as a species can give each other in the time that has been given to us to live and contribute. Always with the certainty that we’re nothing more than an infinitesimal variable in the immeasurable equation of the universe.
As you scale into larger stages and tech-driven works, which creative risk feels most necessary—one that might unsettle your trajectory if it falters, yet redefine it if it succeeds?
Marvelous question to end this interview, one I’m grateful for. You see, in 1999, I travelled to Barcelona with the intention of pursuing my PhD, but for reasons not worth telling, I couldn’t do it. Then, in the middle of a country that means a lot to me for my family story, but until then unknown, I lost myself in a labyrinthine voyage in and out of my being. Inside that entanglement, the minotaur gored me: a vision of an installation so complex that I’d needed a gargantuan sponsor to be developed. Something beyond my means, then. I worked on it for hours or minutes every month or year, but always with the clarity that I felt I’d be able to touch it.
Today and for a few months since I attempted suicide and returned from death, I’ve been working on it understatedly. I’ve applied for that project in several open calls, and I have it in an advanced stage: materials, space, and crew requirements, the technical rider, and its budget. Redefinition of its immersive exploration and proposal with the actual tools at hand. Remaking renders, short AI-generated videos, and soundtrack selection. The accomplishment of this art project would mean my climax as an artist at this point. If that succeeds, I know I’ll unblock [like a videogame] my artwork to the next level. If I don’t, I’ll fight for it until my last breath -consider this statement after my death-. I’ll die in battle, but with my face to the sky.
And please, let me finish with my three mottos:
- Nothing is more visual than music.
- Creation as breathing.
- I love art more than life.
For further information on the artist, please visit the following links:
Social media:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ojolo-abel-garc%C3%ADa-148172243/
https://www.instagram.com/ojolosoy/
website: https://www.ojolo.com.mx/blog
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