Secundino Hernández, Victoria Miro

Spanish artist Secundino Hernández brings his expressive painterly symphony to Victoria Miro Wharf Road.

In the last few years, Secundino Hernández has made a precipitous rise in the European art scene. With a number of solo exhibitions and group shows in major European galleries and US institutions, it’s no surprise that Hernández has recently been snapped up by Victoria Miro to join her exclusive stable of top-tier artists. His first solo exhibition at the gallery’s Islington space is certainly a must-see event for the diary for any art aficionado.  

The artist…

Hernández’s paintings are like rich tapestries of line and colour. Teetering between abstraction and representation, his work displays a melee of influences – from El Grecco to Giacometti to Velázquez to Picabia – underpinned by his extensive knowledge of art history, and, more recently, a specific inquiry into old and modern masters from his native country, Spain. 

The exhibition…

For this, Hernández has created a series of ‘wash’ paintings, involving a process of adding and removing layers of paint. The way in which the paint is removed is akin to a kind of ‘sculptural carving’, imbuing the paintings with a rich, dense texture that varies as you move around the canvas. 

There’s a beautiful exploratory quality about these paintings. Close up the lavish swathes of colour in concert with linear black gestures create a cosmos of vitality and dynamism. At a distance, they seem to allude to something else. In Untitled, a composition of blues and black, a nude is discernible; in another Untitled, a dancing figure emerges beneath a riot of colour and line. 

Hernández has a rigorous approach to his work, as he notes: “It’s very important for me to have everything under control…. They may look like action painting or expressionism, but it’s a deep and meticulous examination of those languages, a way of creating my own contemporary take on a certain aesthetic movement.” Beautiful stuff indeed.