What arrives in Long Time Coming,
the first solo exhibit by Rick Hernandez, is not just a form of departure from
the artist’s earlier works which emphasized the end product and its evident
rootedness to the material world in its investigation of history and the nature of memory. Here is a body
of work which risks the fantasy of moving into the conceptual, into privileging
process, in order to make evident its understanding of the past: that history
is not just a mere pastiche or a presentation of a perceived whole based on an
amalgam of fractured facts—in the case of Hernandez’s collages, bits and pieces
from magazines, books, and other ephemera dating as far back as the 1940s—but
that it is also a course of action, the mode of scrutiny itself, the means by
which the artist makes sense of the rubble gathering at his feet. In this lies
the affinity of Hernandez’s collection to the paintings of Mark Rothko, more
than the geometric shapes and the grids which characterized the latter’s
abstractions and which is now also visible in the surfaces of Hernandez’s
works.
“Forgetting is
so long,” the poet Pablo Neruda said, if not altogether impossible. The act of
forgetting becomes a possibility only if violence is involved, if the mind is
traumatized enough as to cause dislocation or a transitory erasure of images.
We don’t really forget, we just have the “tendency to forget”. For Hernandez,
violence lies underneath the Zen-like calm displayed in his works. The collage
of texts, the reorganized debris of the past, physically remains but is buried underneath
layers upon layers of paint—a literal exposition of the idea that one cannot
really erase the past, it can only be “buried”. The relics by which history
becomes material and by which Hernandez makes sense of his own embeddedness in
history, along with its accumulated value over time, become invisible with the
seemingly arbitrary stroke of putting paint over texts and images, thus
rendering them flat and worthless. By this singular act, Hernandez critiques
history with his bold refusal to remember it—that in this contemporary age
marked by the super-abundance of information, it is the vision of the moment
that is most relevant.
by Oliver Ortega
