Victoria Miro is delighted to present new paintings by Secundino Hernández. The Spanish artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery features a dynamic series of oval works that expand on his unique painting language.
Secundino Hernández’s practice is founded on a quest for new forms and a spirited enquiry into the tools and techniques required to make a painting. This exhibition features a series of oval-shaped works that forge innovative aesthetic ground while drawing upon some of Hernández’s best-known processes and motifs – colours that appear to burst and glide, calligraphic mark-making combined with a stitching process that enriches the linear and structural underpinnings of his work.
Traditionally the oval form, found in religious art where it signifies divinity and the connectedness of mortal and immortal things, as well as the ellipsis used in composition, drawing together disparate motifs, are employed to create a sense of rhythm, unity, or transcendence. The circular swoop of Hernández’s avowedly secular paintings is one that similarly directs eye and mind – to the myriad ways in which lines gravitate across patchworks of sonorous colour. Enfolded too are thoughts around cycles of production and the fruitful ecology of the artist’s studio.
Hernández has said that he likes ‘to create an environment where one thing generates another’. Known for collapsing traditional distinctions and hierarchies of processes and materials, he engages in a dialogue around cyclical methods of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction. As with his celebrated ‘palette’ paintings – expanded and highly visceral iterations that take their cue from the accumulations of the traditional artist’s palette – these new works examine aspects of medium and process, playfully elevating the overlooked or under-considered and investing them with compelling presence.
The surface of each new painting is created not from traditional canvas but from sections of cloth, used by the artist during a screen-printing process in the production of earlier paintings. Infused with pigment from printing screens as they are wiped across them to clean them, the cloths become in effect small colourfield paintings in their own right. Precisely stitched together and stretched on to oval supports, these complex surfaces are then delineated by painted gestures that, while appearing spontaneous and free, are in fact rigorously planned.
Oscillating between freedom and control, each painting is dependent on its own contingencies and tangles of relations between gesture and mosaic-like ground. The eye becomes engrossed in how a flatly painted masked line traverses its stitched equivalent or contrasts with the free washes of colour beneath it, while the cloths themselves sometimes bear a pattern of stripes or part of an existing logo, creating further visual anchors and layers of cultural reference within these rich chromatic fields.
What becomes apparent is that, while the oval form of the painting does away with the ‘problematic corners’ referred to in the exhibition title, Hernández’s process creates countless additional corners where his sections of cloth meet. This might be a metaphor for the artist’s methodology, doing away with one concern only to create further challenges and opportunities, all the while alerting us to what is happening within and between the works on view and rolling us into his endlessly generative process.
