Victoria Miro is delighted to present time TIME, an exhibition of new paintings by Spanish artist Secundino Hernández.
One of the most dynamic painters of his generation, Secundino Hernández is acclaimed for his spirited enquiry into the language, history and enduring potential of abstraction. New works continue his investigation into the vocabulary of painting (line, form, gesture and colour) and historical classifications of the medium (such as action and colourfield painting) to create images that, radiating a sense of urgency, explore not only their own unique process of creation but our responses to a painted surface.
For Hernández, painting is both a physical and cerebral activity, a conduit for intellectual and philosophical enquiry. Whether employing strong linear elements, by turns painterly or calligraphic, or rich bursts of colour, his work corrals diverse influences within a signature abstract language, often collapsing traditional distinctions and hierarchies, as well as a sense of time. In Hernández’s hands, a monochrome might also be an action painting, while an action painting might, on closer inspection, reveal itself to be an almost archaeological excavation of the picture plane’s sedimentary layers.
Writing about these works in a new publication produced to accompany the exhibition, Wells Fray-Smith comments, ‘What is painting? is a simple question that is impossible to answer. Every definition falls short. Yet, Secundino Hernández seems to be obsessed with the question, and his paintings – time and time again – return to this existential enquiry, referencing what painting is, what it has been historically, and what it could be in the future. For the last two decades, he has experimented with abstract and figurative paintings that irreverently point to the contradictions of the medium, the fact that painting can be, and involve, many things at once: spatial and flat, textured and smooth, gestural and linear, graphic and expressionistic, and it can be embedded with marks, colours, scale, form, line, shape, mass, weight through processes that range from pushing, pulling, adding, moulding, scraping, washing off, throwing, dipping, staining.’
The exhibition includes an example of the artist’s celebrated ‘palette’ painting. Created through a highly visceral accumulation of pigment, the painting’s intense impasto surface transforms the ‘stuff’ of painting, its materiality, into an undulating terrain of pigment – elemental and compelling. Also on view are a number of ‘wash’ paintings, created in layers which are partially removed. The resulting works possess a dramatic, exploratory quality that reveal the artist pushing the limits of authorial control.
As Fray-Smith writes, quoting the artist, ‘For Hernández, the painting process of letting go, of “accept[ing] that something else is happening,” is much like life itself: it is about “breaking the dynamic of your whole inner life. You have to open fields or doors or windows … to discover, or not, is the whole journey…”.’
