Secondino Hernández, Painting and Socking

Madrid,

It is difficult to think that the exhibition that now opens its doors in the Alcalá 31 room of the Community of Madrid is the first institutional sample of Histino Hernández: for more than a decade it has been harvesting important successes in Arco and other fairs, both in the form of awards (Catalina D’Anglade obtained in 2018, a five years later was invited in stamp) as fortunate sales, and exhibits its production recurrently in its gallery in the capital, Ehrhardt Flórez. Their creations, usually of monumental format, seem to constitute in a first glance visual games based on color, but in the passing of the years its accentuation of the matter has evolved, of the iridescence of the shades or of the importance given to the canvas; In short, its treatment of the fundamental elements of painting and its perceptual options. In any case, the basis of his works is manifesting relatively stable: he works painting, pointing out and painting again; The instruments used have varied: it uses, of course, brushes, but it has also gotten to use pressure machines when it comes to that action to seize.

Although the pieces that are part of this exhibition review Hernández’s journey in his three decades of experience so far, his commissioner, Joaquín García Martín, has not wanted to raise it as an anthology, but as a kind of portrait of the painter that this Madrid author that this Madrid author It has been until now – through a selection of compositions that could have been others – without losing sight that their paths are still open, that he is an artist in process and does not want to be not; Hence the title of the proposal: “Secondino Hernández in works”. His language has come to be very recognizable despite the fact that, paradoxically and as we can verify here, it has not remained static.

Secondino Hernández in works. Alcalá Sala 31. Community of Madrid. Photography: Jonas Bel

The route is articulated in four sections that respond to many other concerns of this creator in relation to the same painting: the drawing, the shape, the surface and, already on the upper floor, the figure. The first had to lead this exhibition as an architecture from which their and a half canvases are built, as simple as conceptual, which allows Hernández and every artist surely express themselves more freely. As for the surfaces, the examination of their plastic possibilities through textures, which come to vertebrar geographies, will generate spaces by means of the commissioning of plainness; The form will be the basis to structure an individual language through color; And the figure, which according to Secondino always comforts to return, links his works to two historical genres of his discipline: the portrait and the nude.

The starting point of each of these developments are usually concrete ideas, in relation to collective or individual moments and events -hence the figurative drifts, which could otherwise seem unexpected, of their production; From them, a research process of the pictorial event is open to the findings, accidents and, of course, to the deployment of an abstraction whose expressiveness has to do with both the painter’s gesture and his work in a body dimension and with the same with the same Materiality of the pieces: from the frame and the fabric many stories can be told without narrating and perhaps that has been the high school task.

Hernández’s immersion in the creative activity was early and was channeled by traditional roads: the classical education that begins the learning of painting by the drawing, its base and origin, regardless of whether it offers its own possibilities and techniques. That drawing, the author will prove, does not have to be done with pencil, can also be deployed with the pigment tube, with pressure water, adding or removing support material (such as the canvas itself). He tests the artist, is a basic unit of representation – a germ – and the most eloquent and close way to express their intentions.

As for the surfaces, Hernández understands them as much as what is on the canvas, in general, as in relation to the construction of the space on the plane, in particular. We cannot understand his work only from a visual approach, but also from tactility; And not only based on the results, but also on the process of which they are fruit and of which they contain trace (archaeological). His painting is from the same support and preparation, no matter how much it seems that it emerges in the relief, and always houses memory: technique, time, history and accident intervene in it.

The form comes after the drawing and surface: it is made, structure, morphology, and has to do with the tensions or balances between the center and the ends, the light and the serious, and also with the color, which As we said, Hernández adds but also sometimes removes. Its more or less recurrent application according to certain models generates, in the author, a style.

The exhibition culminates, as we advance, presenting its incursions into the figuration: in portraits, born of the addition of layers until reaching a recognizable image, sometimes under some influence, in a speculative sense, of the apostolate of the Greco or of images of Goya; And in nudes, in which for its intimate sense it has worked in small formats, making the viewer in voyeur, except in its translation to major screenwasks. These are female nudes, Hernández has developed them since its inception and in the case of those wider -sized engravings, it combines the reference to exhibitionism and the mere concealment of the reason. Each idea has a private size and sphere to the public, in the passage from the manual to the mechanical, the figure blurs.