Diango Hernández
30 Aug - 18 Oct 2008
DIANGO HERNÁNDEZ
"out-of-place artifacts (OOPArt)
30.08.2008 - 18.10.2008
"Diango Hernández solo shows at Galerie Barbara Thumm and Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer not only share the same title - "out-of-place artifacts (OOPArt)" – as they are inextricably linked, in the way that they constitute a sort of conceptual and material continuous space. Therefore, to have a complete view and understanding of Diango's project complexity one must see the two shows. Common in spirit, a social revolution projection, the shows are a powerful and metaphorical reflection on both social and artistic contexts.
In Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer, Diango presents a sculpture of a book-shelve holding a single but symbolical book, the first edition of Che Guevara's famous treaty "La guerra de Guerrillas" (1960) and a ceiling sculpture which is an upside down dining table that has been transformed into a ceiling lamp.
The two exhibitions share a series of collages that show catalogue pages from historic and valuable European 18th century porcelain, illustrating the aristocratic life at the time and their exotic fantasies. "I have intervened in these pages in a very fundamental way: I have used pieces of porno magazine pages and I have glued them on top of this porcelains in order to mock them, considering that one of the most important principles of a social revolution is to deconstruct the idea of the Burgesia using for this purpose any kind of dirty strategy". (...)
Diango is above all interested in scrutinising the relationship between light and the history of power, aspects which are quite often intimately linked. Thus the works metaphorically refer to the memory of concrete events: in The Bay of Pigs, the figure of the wall crossed by several copies of the magazine LIFE functions as a tenuous physical and mental frontier between two realities, two sides of the same coin, “might the light be an ephemeral error of darkness?”, asks Diango; in "And the light had disappeared", an immense drawing on which the white of the paper represents the light and the black of the pencil the darkness, Diango refers to the founding and clarifying gesture of the artist, a privileged witness to darkness and obscurantism. (...)
The keyword to access Diango Hernández's thought is "drawing". In a work presented at the São Paulo Biennial and titled "We are unfinished drawings", Diango uses the subject of the drawing as a space of frustration and of utopia that is never truly fulfilled in his high expectations. Indeed, drawing as a metaphor for the most inner individual expression has been a particularly productive field of reflection and expression for Diango, in a sort of dialogue of the deaf that he maintains with memory and the effects of the failed collective utopia that was the Communist revolution in Cuba.
It is curious to note how drawing has been understood and used as a tool for thinking and for inventing new forms of living and of conceiving reality in determined contexts. To draw is to project, to project ourselves imaginarily and materially into a given place or feeling or language, whatever. That will to the future is clearly linked to the secret and intimate exercise of drawing. In Diango's work, everything is to be understood as projection, as a desire for transformation, social transformation." (Text by Nuno Faria)
"out-of-place artifacts (OOPArt)
30.08.2008 - 18.10.2008
"Diango Hernández solo shows at Galerie Barbara Thumm and Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer not only share the same title - "out-of-place artifacts (OOPArt)" – as they are inextricably linked, in the way that they constitute a sort of conceptual and material continuous space. Therefore, to have a complete view and understanding of Diango's project complexity one must see the two shows. Common in spirit, a social revolution projection, the shows are a powerful and metaphorical reflection on both social and artistic contexts.
In Galerie Michael Wiesehöfer, Diango presents a sculpture of a book-shelve holding a single but symbolical book, the first edition of Che Guevara's famous treaty "La guerra de Guerrillas" (1960) and a ceiling sculpture which is an upside down dining table that has been transformed into a ceiling lamp.
The two exhibitions share a series of collages that show catalogue pages from historic and valuable European 18th century porcelain, illustrating the aristocratic life at the time and their exotic fantasies. "I have intervened in these pages in a very fundamental way: I have used pieces of porno magazine pages and I have glued them on top of this porcelains in order to mock them, considering that one of the most important principles of a social revolution is to deconstruct the idea of the Burgesia using for this purpose any kind of dirty strategy". (...)
Diango is above all interested in scrutinising the relationship between light and the history of power, aspects which are quite often intimately linked. Thus the works metaphorically refer to the memory of concrete events: in The Bay of Pigs, the figure of the wall crossed by several copies of the magazine LIFE functions as a tenuous physical and mental frontier between two realities, two sides of the same coin, “might the light be an ephemeral error of darkness?”, asks Diango; in "And the light had disappeared", an immense drawing on which the white of the paper represents the light and the black of the pencil the darkness, Diango refers to the founding and clarifying gesture of the artist, a privileged witness to darkness and obscurantism. (...)
The keyword to access Diango Hernández's thought is "drawing". In a work presented at the São Paulo Biennial and titled "We are unfinished drawings", Diango uses the subject of the drawing as a space of frustration and of utopia that is never truly fulfilled in his high expectations. Indeed, drawing as a metaphor for the most inner individual expression has been a particularly productive field of reflection and expression for Diango, in a sort of dialogue of the deaf that he maintains with memory and the effects of the failed collective utopia that was the Communist revolution in Cuba.
It is curious to note how drawing has been understood and used as a tool for thinking and for inventing new forms of living and of conceiving reality in determined contexts. To draw is to project, to project ourselves imaginarily and materially into a given place or feeling or language, whatever. That will to the future is clearly linked to the secret and intimate exercise of drawing. In Diango's work, everything is to be understood as projection, as a desire for transformation, social transformation." (Text by Nuno Faria)