Opening Reception: Friday, February 7th, 6-8pm
DIMIN is pleased to present Facing a Forward Wind, a sequence of fifteen mixed-media panels from New York-based artist Erick Alejandro Hernández. Through shifting forms, sizes, and material approaches, the artist explores the symbolism around the act of waiting and the psychology of space. Figures traverse different settings to form a line, a procession of solitary bodies queued up in expectation. The spaces they inhabit echo the formal conventions of institutions - a hospital, a grocery store, a government office, public-transit. These thresholds where the individual, collective, and institution are entwined are populated by figures from the artist’s life, as well as extracted from art history and film. Through painting, drawing, printmaking, and collage, Hernández explores waiting as a site where anticipation and memory meet.
Facing a Forward Wind investigates the tension between time and history. Using the queue as a guiding image and structure, Hernández questions history as a linear phenomenon, an incessant forward movement. The shifting perspective and positioning of figures allude to an unstable experience of time and space that is plastic, dynamic, and highly subjective. Across the panels, monotype, cyanotype, emulsion, collage, oil, acrylic, dry mediums, and dyes are employed in a rhythmic exercise in painting, aiming for a discordant yet coherent harmony. Similarly, the artist draws on a diverse range of cultural references – spanning from Byzantine and Renaissance painting to a film still from Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul – to activate constructs around belief, migration, exile, and social stigma. These signifiers act as directional clues for the viewer, guiding them toward an indefinite conclusion, a moment of pause, a waiting room full of open windows. Presented in the gallery is just one iteration of the project, which is designed to allow for permutations, additions, and subtractions, each with its new set of associative meanings but all investigating the relationship to time that waiting can afford.
At the queue’s end (or start), Threshold depicts a security guard checking identification while red-ribbon stanchions evoke an anonymous but familiar bureaucratic setting. Succumbing to guiding hands, deciders and rope, the subject exudes both relief and frustration. The surface is littered with intentional decisions as Hernandez oscillates between drawing, staining, sealing, and painterly description. All worked on collaged raw canvas, the piece harnesses the fluidity of painting as a vehicle for reflecting on (and questioning) the personal indifference of existing structures. Acrylic mediums seal and texture parts of the work before being stained with fluid acrylics or worked on with oil paint. Through this process, the artist creates a surface is a record of different speeds existing simultaneously, alchemizing the differences that compose the room. For example, the interior and exterior scenery are rendered in different mediums, alluding to a permeable tension between the two planes. The reflective steel surface of the stanchion projects the scene back towards the viewer, generating an added layer of perceptual information that loosely references that of Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait.
In Platicerio, the artist explores a contemporary landscape as the subject for symbolism. The metal fence, a delimitation that represents a border between public and private space, is at the same time porous to the eye as it is abundant with creatures and plants that pay no mind to barriers imposed by human structures, highlighting the dysfunction and vulnerability of such constructs. Through the meticulous use of monotype, the artist prints into the spaces between chain-links, inverting the spatiality of the setting through material build-up. The platicerium, a recurring motif in the artist’s prior work, sits atop the composition: groundless and rootless as it collects its nutrients from the rain and wind. In works like these, the artist lifts the blinds around an alternative, non-human vision for waiting. Each subsequent panel progresses down the queue, offering different frames of the human condition. Some are individual, others paired, while some contain no human subject. Ultimately a reflection on mortality, Facing a Forward Wind casts the future as a terminus: A constant waiting, a constant looking ahead, making eye contact with the crown of someone’s head until they, inevitably, reach your common destination before you do.
Erick Alejandro Hernández (b. 1994) is an artist from Matanzas, Cuba, living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Hernández has been a fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Oxbow, Yaddo, Macdowell, Mass MoCA, The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Lighthouse Works, The Royal Drawing School at Dumfries House, and Fountainhead, among others. He is the recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant and the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Excellence in Painting. Hernandez has had solo exhibitions with Murmurs (Los Angeles) and Yossi Milo (New York), in addition to recent group shows at Perrotin (New York), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles), Wilding Cran (Los Angeles), Island (New York), PTT (Taipei), and Spurs (Beijing). In the coming year, Hernandez will be a resident at the Monira Foundation at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City.