Rodrigo Hernández

Rodrigo Hernández studied visual arts in the la Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado, “La Esmeralda” in Mexico City and he completed his masters at the Akademie der bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, in Karlsruhe, Germany, in the class of artist Silvia Bächli. Hernández has developed a poetics in which elements from literature, art history and observation of the world converge in a new continuously evolving vocabulary, spoken from the surface of things. As if left alone to gaze at each other, figurative and abstract motifs unite and dialogue with each other, generating works that remind us of the unknown, yet present themselves to us with a warm familiarity. The result, poetic and somehow ironic, looks like the coming together of a universe intented to seek balance between physics and metaphysics, figuration and abstraction. It is no coincidence that consistent aspects of such a universe are explicitly inspired by the metaphysical paintings of Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. If he depicted mannequins and statues in his landscapes, Hernández usually presents a human silhouette in different stages of abstraction. This figure, however, is never what we understand as an “individual”; without ever exhibiting traits of singularity, it functions instead as a link between the artist, the work and the viewer and tell us, through the most generic nature of its traits, that it is through that which is most common that the individual becomes accessible. [...] In a way that is subtle and unostensive, without asking Hernández induces the viewer to follow the associative method that informs his practice. Looking at his work is like translating poetry: an act that is only possible if translators become poets themselves ...

MADRAGOA is a contemporary art gallery founded in 2016 in the homonymous neighborhood of Lisbon’s historical center. Since its beginning, the gallery has been an early supporter of a number of international young artists such as Adrián Balseca, Rodrigo Hernández, Renato Leotta, Buhlebezwe Siwani, Joanna Piotrowska, and Yuli Yamagata, whose first productions and exhibition have been produced and promoted by the gallery and often presented for the first time in Portugal. Moreover, Madragoa launched the careers of young Portuguese artists such as Sara Chang Yan, Luís Lázaro Matos, Gonçalo Preto, and Jaime Welsh, giving them visibility on the international scene. From its peripheral location in Europe, MADRAGOA’s project focuses on how to set a deep conversation with the city and its extraordinary potential, setting a dialogue between global artistic practices and local craftsmanship and ideas. The gallery always created experiences of research and production for its artists locally and promotes its program also through the participation in a number of international art fairs, gallery exchanges, and exhibition projects. MADRAGOA is currently recognized as one of the most innovative realities in the Portuguese art scene, while it succeeded to obtain visibility internationally throughout its years of its activity. At the moment, the gallery actively represents artists from Portugal, Italy, Ecuador, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Brazil and South Africa. ...