It’s an exciting moment for the upcoming Portuguese artist, ahead of a first artist monograph due to be published in the summer next year with American Art Catalogues and Trifolio, bringing together years of work, including the work developed during a one year residency at the prestigious Laurenz Haus Foundation (Schaulager) in Basel.

“What has always compelled me about Jaime’s work is the ferocity of his attention” says Welsh’s champion for The Wick, fellow artist Jenkin van Zyl. “I’ve known Jaime long enough to recognise that his gaze isn’t tentative; it’s surgical, carrying something of Patrick Bateman’s cinematic psychopathology. His anal devotion to composition, to symmetry and perfection as discipline, orchestrates figures inside Borgesian labyrinths.

These bodies arrive languid, drifting inward as if caught in a narcotic ascension. They slump inside refrigerated tableaux: faces mirrored in black marble, limbs slackened into green carpet, dwarfed by murals of martial parricide. Mahogany, marble, and studded bronze become not just design but ideology: history rendered as cryonic theatre, beauty alienated within complex legacies of power.

And so everything in these images is both upheld and overwhelmed by the architecture that contains it. What I admire most is how Jaime holds all this with such rigour; the images remain beautiful, exacting, and—importantly—uneasy. They remind us that difficult histories never resolve. They endure, and we live inside their afterlife.”

It’s a poetic framing that perfectly captures the cinematic scope of Welsh’s work, a mounting noirish tension that underpins his seemingly stark images – the artist points to filmmakers such as Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “uncompromising treatment of violence and ideology, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s austerity and emotional rigour, and Luchino Visconti’s historical awareness and examinations of class, decay and power.” Themes of alienation, and a persistent interest in the “ethics of looking” also play into the work – a nod to directors Michael Haneke and Jonathan Glazer. “These sensibilities resonate with some questions I’m trying to explore, even if my own path and medium are different.”