Enrique Hernández

Saenger Galería presents the first solo exhibition of tapatío artist Enrique Hernández in Mexico City, Una línea en construcción (Fuga incidental), curated by Juvenal Urzúa and Christian Barragán.

Assuming as his own the slogan of the North American painter Clyfford Still, “It is intolerable to stop at the edge of a frame”, Enrique Hernández (Guadalajara, 1975) transitions from a painting on canvas with features that debate between post-figurative and abstract, towards a painting closer to the so-called non-objective, through locations that make assemblage their common denominator. After carrying out the project Traspasar un jardín (el edén enmarañado), exhibited at the Museo Cabañas (Guadalajara, 2023) and at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Querétaro (2023-2024), Enrique has deepened and refined his conception of pictorial displacement and now situates his practice in the middle of a disjunctive that he defines as “opening a space of exchange between the introspective and the public”; a line under construction that goes beyond the pictorial surface and becomes an incidental flight over the exhibition space, interrupting the conventional course to contemplate and contain a painting, to converse about it. Similar to the frenzy experienced daily in his studio, Enrique Hernández transports you from one environment to another, to return later to a word inscribed on a wall or to the search for a book in the library; he stops off in the kitchen to make coffee, light a cigarette or pour himself a tequila, at the same time he passes by frames and canvases with the smell of oil and turpentine; in the background there's Iggy Pop or whoever Enrique is interested in bringing to mind at that moment. His current exercise of painting happens in situ; it is a painting that transits, that happens while it articulates a sense of movement governed, like his conversation, by a foreseen pattern and an unexpected intuition. The artist's present work –consisting of assemblages made with heavy wooden poles from the construction of buildings that have been prepared with DM55 and acrylic, densely painted with oil paint– provokes a rupture in space, a palpable incision that reconfigures the way we relate to a painting, and even more, to the reality of the pictorial. After the interest in the image (which often cites natural and urban landscapes, whether these are extracted from a virtual dimension such as the distorted images of Google Earth or from the streets, where graffiti is a flagship gesture), Enrique Hernández has decided to cross the limits of the painting and install a line where the “landscape-space” converges in real time. Or, as he prefers to put it, to build a fugue of “pure pictorial materiality.”

–Juvenal Urzúa and Christian Barragán