Secundino Hernández: Paso, Victoria Miro

In the past few years, Secundino Hernández has helped bust the European art scene open. With a number of solo exhibitions and group shows in major European galleries and US institutions, it’s no surprise that the Madrid-based artist was snapped up by leading gallerist Victoria Miro to join her roster of top-tier artists.

Hernández produces rich tapestries of line and colour. Teetering between abstraction and representation, the work is underpinned by his extensive knowledge of art history, and, more recently, a specific inquiry into old and modern masters from his native country. There’s a beautiful exploratory quality about his painting: the lavish swathes of colour in concert with linear black gestures create a cosmos of vitality and dynamism.

In a new body of works on display at Victoria Miro Mayfair, figurative forms are conjured from a dynamic interplay of lines and marks. Hernández thinks of these works as 'invented portraits' – modelled not on specific individuals but analytical of techniques, such as chiaroscuro, used to delineate and describe a figure in space. For the artist, the process of 'making and unmaking' these works speaks metaphorically of how identity is forged through time: 'We are all constructed from these broken moments. We continue, we fall, and we continue again.'

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.