Secundino Hernández by Victoria Miro

SECUNDINO HERNÁNDEZ

Victoria Miro

Chance and intuition Lorena Muñoz-Alonso

Secundino Hernández’s paintings embody a struggle between control and chaos. They are the result of seemingly conflicting techniques, whereby carefully planned compositions are offered up, like symbolic pictorial sacrifices, to chance and intuition to wreak havoc across the canvas. His recent output, for example, begins with the stretching of thick canvases onto aluminium frames, to which layers of oil, acrylic, alkyd and gouache are applied. Then, taking a heavy-duty pressure washer to the paintings, he strips layers of pigment away. For Hernández, this almost aggressive act is a search for the bare essentials of painting, removing anything extraneous or superfluous. It feels as if for the artist, destruction – undoing and questioning his own work on a constant basis – is just as important as creation.

I have never seen this process taking place but it does hold a strong evocative power and, picturing it in my head, it acquires a certain performative tone, in which the body of the artist – machine in hand, goggles donned and overalls on – slips onto a plane of pure physicality, unified with his paintings and accoutrements. This is painting understood as a process of removal rather than addition, which also has a sculptural bent in that the artist literally shapes the volumes and textures of the pigments until he reaches the desired form.

Despite my interdisciplinary musings, the Spanish painter places himself firmly in the tradition of painting “about painting”: that quest for pictorial immanence grounded in process and materiality, which

turns the artist’s studio into a stage where a relentless search for new, self-developed methodologies is carried out. His studio is the self-contained locus of his work, the place where he researches and paints, where he thinks and acts. Through this inward process of looking and producing he creates a self-sufficient universe aimed at materialising pictorial ideas that he iterates, reworks and challenges in long series, creating simultaneously a sense of continuity and variation. When contemplated in groups, one starts to feel that Hernández’s paintings are clusters of voices performing an interior monologue out loud, slipping in and out of sync with each other.

I realise that I seem to be saying that Hernández’s paintings speak or hum, between each other and to themselves. But if they do, what are they saying? Well, to begin with, how they were made. They reveal the threads of the canvases, unveiled by the stripped pigment, as well as the remains of colour trials and splashes made by the cleaning of brushes. It is as if Hernández wanted to leave some hints of his techniques, inviting us to participate in the proceedings by guessing the steps that constituted them. The process is elaborate, and one feels compelled to reciprocate with a proportional degree of attention. His are paintings that benefit from slow contemplation, and in a period where the act of looking has become so accelerated and banal, the durational demands that Hernández exerts on us result in an experience that is quite meditative. The Unknown Masterpiece I find myself at a private view in a small artist-run space in East London, sipping warm beer from a can and discussing the work of Hernández with an artist friend who, as it happens, is a figurative painter. He suddenly turns to me and says, in a rather mysterious way, that Hernández’s paintings remind him of Balzac’s short story The Unknown Masterpiece (1845). I nod my head energetically, in ersatz agreement, and make a mental note to revisit the text as soon as I possibly can.

Later that night, wedged between the silence of a dark room and the glow of my laptop screen, I think I find exactly what he means:

"The old lansquenet is laughing at us," said Poussin, coming once more toward the supposed picture. "I can see nothing there but confused masses of colour and a multitude of fantastical lines that go to make a dead wall of paint.” "We are mistaken, look!" said Porbus. In a corner of the canvas, as they came nearer, they distinguished a bare foot emerging from the chaos of colour, half-tints and vague shadows that made up a dim, formless fog. Its living delicate beauty held them spellbound. This fragment that had escaped an incomprehensible, slow, and gradual destruction seemed to them like the Parian marble torso of some Venus emerging from the ashes of a ruined town.

In this story Balzac conjures up the plight of a misunderstood (and visionary) painter, who sounds like an abstract expressionist avant la lettre. And there is something in this specific passage, which so vividly expresses the surprise, joy almost, of finding a figurative element in a sea of abstraction that resonates with the paintings of Hernández. In them we find, indeed, “confused masses of colour” as well as a “multitude of fantastical lines”. And while we do not quite find a “bare foot emerging from the chaos of colour” there certainly are figurative remnants that can be intuited in most of his works.

The tension between representation and abstraction, a theme that underpins the whole of Hernández’s oeuvre, is particularly stark in his most recent series. In them mazes of colours and lines seem to have exploded, projecting elements of figurative debris towards the viewer, like a painterly version of the mesmerizing last scene in Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Zabriskie Point (1970). In other works, with the

canvas cast as a palimpsest, these discernable residues take the form of the studio floor and walls, a “painting within a painting” that plunges the viewer into an inconclusive mise en abyme. But despite the clash of volumes, colours and cyphers, despite the pull between entropy and recognisable forms, the pale backgrounds of the paintings and delicate interplay of lines and planes create a certain sense of flatness. Suddenly, I can glimpse serenity among the commotion. Scribbles and other convulsive lines It’s a sunny Spring afternoon and I am talking to Hernández on the phone. He is in Madrid, where he has three large studios, finishing the paintings that will form this exhibition. Because Hernández paintings are about painting (meta-paintings, one could say), he is clearly enthused as he describes his processes and techniques.

I ask him about the crucial role of the line in his work, and he answers by explaining his long-standing fascination with scribbles, the most recurrent motif in the paintings in this show. He tells me that one of his most enduring obsessions is the drive of the hand to scribble on paper, this compulsion to doodle we have all engaged in at sometime or other, whether speaking on the phone or attending a boring meeting or lecture. Hernández usually works from small drawings, which he then scales up to large compositions, and he says he’s always felt compelled to translate this type of automatic, intimate drawing from paper to canvas. But in doing that he encountered a problem: the brush is neither a biro nor a pencil; it runs dry pretty quickly. So what did he do? Devised several tools to paint straight from the tube, yet another of his highly idiosyncratic strategies.

The presence of scribbles and painterly accretions is perhaps the reason why Hernández’s paintings are sometimes aligned within the Abstract Expressionism tradition, and with the work of Cy Twombly in particular. Hernández’s pictorial vocabulary certainly shares some traits with the New York School – and

with its coeval European response, Informalism – including the studio-based approach, the inclination towards inwardness and the intuitive gesture. But Hernández is more interested in studying the drive of automatic painting through a careful and repetitive editing process than in indulging in the “classic” expressionist brushstroke. And when asked about historical references, Hernández is more prone to gush about the German painter Albert Oehlen and a handful of lesser-known Spanish abstract painters of the 20th century that include the still active Andalusian painter Luis Gordillo and the Catalan Luís Claramunt.

It seems clear to me that Hernández’s work visibly differs from Twombly’s, as he provides a meticulous and technical counterpoint to the late painter’s emotional catharsis-on-canvas. But I would like, nevertheless, to end these notes on Hernández with a chiming quote from The Wisdom of Art, the essay that Roland Barthes penned precisely on Cy Twombly in 1979:

As we can see, these gestures [scribbling, erasing, smudging] are all associated with making something dirty. Here is a paradox: a fact is more purely defined if it is not clean.[…] The truth of things is best read in refuse. It is in a smear that we find the truth of redness; it is in a wobbly line that we find the truth of a pencil. Ideas (in the Platonic sense of the word) are not metallic and shiny figures, in conceptual corsets, but rather faint shaky stains, on a vague background.

Arrested in stasis, like organic movements briefly held, Hernández’s compositions offer us the essential truth of the act and craft of painting, which, elusive and intricate, cannot be expressed, nor found, in any other medium.

All paintings: Untitled, 2014 Gouache, acrylic, oil and alkyd on canvas 280 x 210 cm 路 110 1/4 x 82 5/8 in

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Secundino Hernández 11 June - 2 August 2014 Victoria Miro Gallery I · 16 Wharf Road · London N1 7RW

Essay by Lorena Muñoz-Alonso Design by Martin Lovelock Photography by Joaquín Cortés Installation photography by Stephen White Edited by Martyn Richard Coppell

Printed and bound by PUSH

All images courtesy Secundino Hernández & Victoria Miro, London

Published by Victoria Miro 2014 ISBN 978 0 9927092 3 5

Copyright © The Victoria Miro Gallery All rights reserved. No part of this book should be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording or information storage or retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher

Secundino Hern谩ndez 11 June - 2 August 2014 Victoria Miro Gallery I 16 Wharf Road 路 London N1 7RW