Reading time: 3 minutes

A
A

13.01.2015

Go, gentle scorpio

Parallel, Oaxaca, México
December 19, 2014 – January 11, 2015

Rodrigo_Hernandez_gentle_scorpio09895

Rodrigo_Hernandez_gentle_scorpio11

Rodrigo_Hernandez_gentle_scorpio12

“The head is the most important part of the figure,

The body and the legs are less weighty

Active hands are emphasized, like speaking mouths

Quantity is used to emphasize intensity.

Inactive, unimportant or uninteresting parts are only indicated or neglected. There are even figures without bodies. You will find without my explanation in which direction our interest is led, where our attention is absorbed…”

These lines refer to a series of slides of Mexican pre-Columbian sculptures Josef Albers showed during a lecture entitled “Truthfulness in Art”. The audience in the dimly lit room at Harvard in 1940 was able to see the pictures he described. Today, the reader of the transcript can only meet them in his imagination.

There’s an idea to be found in many theories about the origin of sculpture suggesting that the first creation of representations was triggered by mental images or by the perception of accidents, of natural origin or produced by non-iconic human traces. This “fortuitous realism” could be then attributed to a faculty of projection, associated with a better-understood faculty of feature recognition (i.e. the ability to recognize an object from visual clues). Some researchers like the rock expert Robert G. Bednarik have come to say this process has its origin on the inherent ambiguity of visual perception or what he calls “imaginative perception”.

Two main questions behind this project are: What is the starting point of a sculpture? How do you represent something you haven’t yet seen?

In a scene from the movie “Bullets over Broadway” we can see an actress fooling her director and playwright into transforming her character in the play. She does it so openly (to the point of the absurd) that we are led to question to what extent the director is still in control of his own fiction work. One can see a similarity between this process and the one of making sculpture.

Rodrigo Hernández 

Parallel Oaxaca would like to thank for their kind support: Salvador Bautista, Lorena Ancona, Anna Szaflarski, Ayami Awazuhara, Valentina Jager, Mariana Castillo Deball, Manuel Raeder, Santiago da Silvia, Vera Kandt, Alejandro Hernández Martínez, Marcela Sarquis Landis, Daniela Carranza Sarquís.

BIO

Rodrigo Hernández, lives and works in Basel and Mexico City. He has an undergraduate degree in visual arts from “La Esmeralda”, Mexico City, and holds a MFA from the Kunstakademie Karlsruhe (D). He took part in the Postacademic Research Program of the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht and is currently a resident of the Laurenz Stiftung in Basel (CH).

Recent solo exhibitions include: What is the moon?, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2014) and A Sense of Possibility at Weingrüll, Karlsruhe (2014). Forthcoming solo shows will take place at Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City and Kim?, Riga. His work has been featured in group shows at: David Roberts Art Foundation, London; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; FRAC ProvenceAlpesCôte-d’Azur, Marseille; Thomas Dane Gallery, London; Kunsthaus Baselland; NO SPACE, Mexico City; Kunstverein Freiburg; Nuevo Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Guatemala; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, among others. (http://www.rodrigo-hernandez.net/)

Courtesy of the artist and Parallel

Link : www.paralleloaxaca.com

Comments

There are no coments available.

filter by

Category

Geographic Zone

date