JIMMY LENIS

Jimmy Lenis (b. Santiago de Cali, 1958) is a Colombian contemporary painter whose practice unfolds through a socially critical aesthetic grounded in philosophical reflection. His work confronts themes of marginality, poverty, famine, apartheid and skeletal portraiture—subjects that have shaped his sensibility since childhood and continue to inform his visual language with urgency and conviction.

Rooted in figuration yet traversing diverse aesthetic movements throughout his career, Lenis has absorbed influences ranging from Impressionism to expressionist tendencies, integrating them into a personal grammar marked by tension and intensity. His compositions oscillate between structure and rupture, where gesture becomes both denunciation and meditation.

The presence of Thanatos—death as existential force—remains latent across his oeuvre, coexisting with the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Order, rationality and measured restraint confront their antithesis: excess, desire and the overflow of pleasure. This dialectical interplay generates a charged visual field in which discipline and instinct continuously collide.

Through stark imagery and symbolic fragmentation, Lenis transforms the canvas into a site of confrontation. His paintings do not merely represent social realities; they expose their psychological weight. Emerging from a Colombian context marked by historical and social complexity, his practice positions art as an act of witness—an aesthetic response to injustice that seeks not resolution, but awareness.