A large structure floats behind many thin layers of color. It is open; at times, it also seems to float above the ground. Weightless yet bathed in light—a direct light that reveals its sturdiness through distinct shadows. Is it a ruin? It seems to have been there for a long time, and as if within it, in that diffuse interior, there were a space where time moves slower.

Having trained in engineering, science, and fine arts, Jaime Franco has been interested in architecture since he began his artistic exploration in 1987. He draws and models structures that linger in his memory, later translating them into his paintings, which are almost always large-scale. He frequently revisits them, blurring them between layers of oil paint.

These spaces—portals, perhaps—hold two or more forces within their surfaces. Symmetry, accurate technical lines, and isometric interpretation coexist with delicate glazes applied gesturally, which, in short, raise the question of whether the canvas is a city wall or the remnant of a centennial structure.

The works gathered here, produced between 2019 and 2026, remind the torii, an element of Shinto architecture that marks the entrance to a sacred place, a gateway where the material world meets the spiritual world. Typically, the torii is a carmine-red wooden archway standing alone in space, like a gate without a building that signals the beginning of the shrine.

Jaime Franco’s structures resemble the 20th-century Brutalist style, with their folded forms and the materiality suggested by concrete. They also bring to mind the industrial city through the insistent repetition of a single type. However, in the clash of forces between technical restraint and the freedom of gesture, they invite us to seek the limits of form, that void where intermediate, diffuse, and powerful spaces for contemplation open up.

Through his paintings, he reminds us that repetition is a form of re-creation, and that insisting on a form and a process leads to a profound understanding of them.