Exhibition
Secundino Hernández. Today
16 Sep 2015 – 31 Oct 2015
Address
- Seilerstätte 16
- Vienna
Wien - 1010
- Austria
It’s a natural and useful process. As the career of an artist becomes consolidated, his work is subject to a discourse that facilitates knowledge of the same and determines its popularity.
About
This discourse highlights characteristic elements while silencing and eclipsing others, in order to give order and coherence to the overall reading of the work. Thanks to this task, carried out by gallery owners, critics and curators, success appears to be the logical and happy result of a well-spun narrative in which there are hardly any loose ends and which conveys a sense of agreeable security.
In recent years, we’ve been able to see how this process has operated on Secundino Hernández’s work. In the array of essays, articles and interviews that the specialised media increasingly dedicate to him, prominence is given to his passion for the basic elements of painting: colour, line and plane. Mention is made of his insatiable desire to research and the key role he ascribes to his studio. And of his need to connect with the great pictorial tradition, and, in particular, with the great Spanish masters. Gradually a canonical discourse is being built up that helps the dissemination and understanding of his work. However, this discourse fails to embrace those aspects of Secundino’s imaginary universe that are other, disconcerting and verge on bad taste. References to mass culture, rock music or his liking for dirty jokes are digressions that are difficult to fit in. All can be found, in one form or another, in the drawings by the Madrid painter on show at the Galerie Krinzinger early this autumn.
