Albers’ ‘Homage to the square’ extensive series of paintings and studies about color fields, is for me one of the most intriguing artistic strategies of the 20th century. As we know Albers introduced only subtle changes in the formal structure of these series of paintings, in his color field paintings the relevant changes come from the variation and perception of color itself. Albers’ ‘Homage to the Square’ represents to me an extraordinary reflection on perception in general. Formal changes are detected more easily by our senses but color changes are way more subtle, only the good and keen observer can tell when they have changed. The squares in Albers are for me isolated areas, they are well defined frontiers as if they were boundaries definitions in a colonial Mapa Mundi, only the colors can eventually change but the isolation and restrictions are a permanent circumstance, a formal and structural fatality. I altered the title of Albers’ series in the same way I decided to substitute in each painting a color filed by an strange layer (a book page). In this way the squares are no longer limits, they became stratus. They hold and give support to each other but unfortunately the ones under can’t be properly seen.

I just forgot an speculative remark -The notion of order proposed / imposed by Germany in the actual European economy maybe represents a new beginning for colonialism. Albers was one of the German Bauhaus artists that contributed to define the ‘New laws’ of perception and understanding of co-relations between a physical fact and a psychic effect. The Gestalt psychologists greatly influenced Albers practice, specially Rudolf Arnheim. Order is a necessary condition for anything the human mind is to understand. Arrangements such as the layout of a city or building, a set of tools, a display of merchandise, the verbal exposition of facts or ideas, or a painting or piece of music are called orderly when an observer or listener can grasp their overall structure and the ramification of the structure in some detail. Order makes it possible to focus on what is alike and what is different, what belongs together and what is segregated. When nothing superfluous is included and nothing indispensable left out, one can understand the interrelation of the whole and its parts, as well as the hierarchic scale of importance and power by which some structural features are dominant, other subordinate. When order comes from disciplined creative processes could develop into a reactionary doctrine. Introducing doubts into logical order allows us to create mistakes, which are for me the fundamentals assets of positive development. One of the most known maxims of the Gestalt psychologists is: “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts”

The last layer, let’s call it the visible and the one that can easily be removed, come from Fidel Castro’s speech about Che’s death in Bolivia. Somehow his death marked a very important moment for the post-colonial times. That’s the last layer of each one of the collages, a pinned floating book page, the only layer in that piece that can be easily replaced. I guess the only layer that can also easily be added to many other complicated juxtapositions of historical contemporary events.

Diango Hernández 2013
Works exhibited by
Marlborough Contemporary
at ArtCologne 2013

*The Colon Cemetery or more fully in the Spanish language Cementerio de Cristóbal Colón was founded in 1876 in the Vedado neighborhood of Havana. Named for Christopher Columbus, the 140-acre (57 ha) cemetery is noted for its many elaborately sculpted memorials. It is estimated that today the cemetery has more than 500 major mausoleums, chapels, and family vaults.

Diango Hernández, 2013

Opening 02.03.2013 – 13.04.2013 (Press release)

The Cuban-born Diango Hernández’s first solo exhibition at Capitain Petzel is entitled Komplette Zimmer (Complete Rooms) and encompasses all three levels of the gallery; it presents works specially conceived for the exhibition space.
Hernández always defines line in terms of an idea become form – and thus as the transformation of an abstract concept into real existence. In doing so, he does not privilege any of the found, often simple, materials that he uses in his work, including fragments of furniture, technical devices such as aerials or radio components and diverse artistic media. These serve to give visual form and assign value to the individual and improvised creative achievement in its contrast to rigid social and political systems. Hernández fragments and reduces the reality that surrounds us. Through his often playful handling of apparently incompatible layers, he creates a new sensibility for the aspiration to and the necessity of individual freedom.
The main theme of this exhibition is the idea or thought’s materialisation and its becoming form through drawing: as a line on paper or transformed in three-dimensional space. Here, in a manner that is no less precise than it is poetic, Hernández raises the question of the concept of reality at the chronological levels of past, present and future.
The main hall of the gallery contains an expansive floor installation, entitled Granite and comprising 42 graphite-coloured, light and fragile sculptures. The striking use of line, realised differently in each object, evokes a densely spaced field of graves. And in fact, the contours here, translated 1:1 into the three-dimensional realm, do derive from production drawings out of a granite-industry textbook on tombstones (Granite, 1950s).
The transfer from the design of a gravestone as a monument to a human existence is further minimalised by Hernández. He transmits the drawing into space, and in this way – enhanced through the use of pure graphite on the wood-surface – he sketches the impression of a cemetery. Hernández’s table installation in the lower level, entitled Silent Party, 2013, represents the ‘level of the past’. On each of the 60 paginated blank pages removed from a book from 1910 – which featured photographs of gravestones – there lies the more or less deformed clasp of a sparkling wine or champagne bottle. Over the course of several years, Hernández gathered these each New Year’s morning after the New Year’s Eve celebrations along the banks of the Rhine in Düsseldorf; he then archived them as artefacts of the numerous human encounters and the goodwill of this special night.
The three groups of works Komplette Zimmer (the title of the exhibition) occupy the cabinet in the first floor, along with a bronze object of Elements from a Thonet chair. These images show furniture ensembles from a 1954 catalogue of the VEB Möbelwerkstätten Hellerau, which, at that time, were sold only as complete set. They are transferred to canvas with pigment print. The original images are drastically vertically compressed to narrow strips, the furniture barely identifiable, becoming almost a line.
Finally, frame-like wooden constructions can be found on the walls of the gallery level; these can be referred back to closet systems’ arrangements of drawers and doors, hung with assembelage-like paintings on linen table cloths that have been unfolded and painted with watercolours by Hernández. These trousseau goods had previously been stored for decades in private households before being used – and perhaps unfolded for the first time – as supports for paintings and absorbing traces of colour. The contrast between the traces of time, deriving from the linens’ storage, and Hernández’s light and open painting offer a potentially optimistic perspective on the future.

Press release (German version)

Die erste Einzelausstellung von Diango Hernández bei Capitain Petzel mit dem Titel Komplette Zimmer präsentiert auf allen drei Galerieebenen speziell für den Ausstellungsort konzipierte Werke des aus Kuba stammenden Künstlers.
Immer definiert Hernández die Linie als Form gewordene Idee (die Zeichnung) und damit die Transformation eines abstrakten Inhaltes in eine reale Existenz. Er verwendet dabei gleichberechtigt gefundene, oft einfache Materialien wie Möbelfragmente, technische Geräte wie Antennen oder Radiobauteile und vielfältige künstlerische Mittel, wie Skulptur, Zeichnung, Buchreproduktionen und Malereien. Diese dienen dabei der Sichtbarmachung und Wertschätzung der individuellen wie improvisierten kreativen Leistung im Gegensatz zu starren gesellschaftlichen und politischen Systemen.
Diango Hernández fragmentiert und reduziert die uns umgebende Realität. Er schafft durch seinen oft spielerischen Umgang mit scheinbar nicht zusammen gehörenden Ebenen eine neue Sensibilität für den Anspruch und die Notwendigkeit der Freiheit des Individuums innerhalb der zeitlichen Dimensionen von Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft.
In der Haupthalle der Galerie befindet sich eine raumfüllende Bodeninstallation aus 42 graphitfarbenen,  fragilen Skulpturen mit dem Titel Granite. Die augenfällige, für jedes Objekt unterschiedlich ausgearbeitete Linienführung evoziert das Bild eines hochverdichteten Feldes von Grabsteinen. Tatsächlich entstammen die hier 1:1 übertragenen Umrisse von Produktionszeichnungen aus einem Fachbuch der Granitindustrie über Grabsteine (‘Granit‘, 1950er Jahre). Der Transfer von dem Entwurf eines Grabsteines als Denkmal für eine menschliche Existenz wird von Diango Hernández weiter minimalisiert. Er verlegt die Zeichnung in den dreidimensionalen Raum und entwirft so, verstärkt durch die Verwendung von reinem Graphit auf der Holzoberfläche, die Anmutung eines Friedhofes.
Die Tisch-Installation im Untergeschoss mit dem Titel Silent Party, 2013 soll die ‘Ebene der Vergangenheit‘ repräsentieren.  Auf sechzig herausgetrennten, paginierten Blanko-Seiten eines Buches aus dem Jahr 1910 – mit Fotografien von Grabdenkmälern – liegt jeweils ein mehr oder weniger deformierter Verschluss einer Sekt- oder Champagner-Flasche. Hernández hat sie über mehrere Jahre hinweg jeweils am Neujahrsmorgen nach der Silvesternacht am Düssseldorfer Rheinufer gesammelt und als Artefakte zahlreicher menschlicher Begegnungen und guten Wünsche aus dieser besonderen Nacht archiviert.
Die drei Gruppen von Komplette Zimmer (Titel der Ausstellung) bestimmen das Kabinett im Obergeschoss zusammen mit einem Bronzeobjekt aus Elementen eines Thonet-Stuhls. Die Bilder zeige Möbel-Ensembles aus einem Katalog der VEB Möbelwerkstätten Hellerau aus dem Jahr 1954, die nur als komplette Zimmer angeboten wurden. Sie sind mit Pigment Druck auf Leinwände übertragen. Die Original-Abbildungen sind extrem vertikal komprimiert zu einem schmalen Streifen zusammengepresst, die Möbel kaum noch identifizierbar, fast zu einer Linie werdend.
Auf der Empore bilden rahmenartige Holzkonstruktionen, die ihre Referenz in der Anordnung von Schubladen- und Türen von Schranksystemen haben, behangen mit gefalteten und von Hernández mit Aquarellfarben bemalten Leinen-Tischdecken Assemblage-artige Malereien. Diese Aussteuer-Ware lagerte jahrzehntelang verborgen in privaten Haushalten, bevor sie nun, womöglich erstmals entfaltet, als Bildträger verwendet werden und Aquarellfarbe absorbieren. Der Kontrast zwischen den Zeitspuren der Lagerung dieser Tücher und der leichten und offenen Malerei stellt für Hernández eine Perspektive auf die Zukunft dar.

Capitain Petzel
Karl-Marx-Allee 45
10178 Berlin
t: +49 (0)30 240 88 130
f: +49 (0)30 240 88 1318
www.capitainpetzel.de
info@capitainpetzel.de

Diango Hernández: The Storage room of a museum is indeed a very interesting place. Often seen either as a cemetery or as a greenhouse. I prefer to see it as a greenhouse. In most cases artworks travel a long road before getting into a museum collection, most artworks are acquired after they have been exhibited in several venues and in many cases the acquisition happens after the artworks has been already in another collection. My point is that an artwork has scientifically speaking a past, a present and a future but these three stages are not precisely clear under my point of view. I see contexts as a very important quality specially when it comes to understand how current an artwork is. Creating a rich context for an artwork is not a simple task to perform because it demands a continuous curatorial trajectory and at the same time requires a multi-layering surface from where people can read not only what is visible but also what has been done and what is hidden under the appearances of an exhibition. Museum walls are not magic neither their nails. It is not by a magic wall that an art piece gets acknowledged, more than often it takes years to validate an artwork, certainly museum walls can help but can’t make miracles. We must remember that what hangs in a museum is not only an artwork but the life of an artist together with the lives of many other that have given their very important contribution to the artist path.

Who is behind an acquisition could change many things for both the artist and the artwork. I was very positive when I got to know that the commission was interested in acquiring ´Mother the future was a political lie…´ at the time I knew some of the members of the commission and I knew how serious they were while making such decisions. After this installation was acquired it has been permanently traveling and exhibited in many different important venues e.g. Museum Abteiberg, MART Rovereto, Helena Rubenstein Pavilion, Museum of Tel Aviv. Now that the Bundeskunsthalle decided to include ´Mother the future was a political lie…´ I can’t be happier. Nevertheless is all right when an artwork ´rests´ and is ´resting´ in a good and thoughtful storage room…

JS: Is the being of an artwork bound to its context of presentation?

DH: Yes they are bounded, especially if we talk about curatorial contexts. Nevertheless consistent artworks could have certain autonomy and can survive rough or improvised contexts. When artworks are well presented and properly introduced they can develop into a source of research for the artist itself, it is when a curatorial process can become a stimulating and a rich process not only for the artwork but also for the artist that created it.

Speaking about social-political-economical contexts I have always thought that even artworks created and presented under specific situations can have a second life. There are many factors that can manipulate the reading of an artwork but when they are properly inserted into an understandable tradition the artwork can develop into something new, something totally different than what it formally was.

JS: As we can see in the exhibition, many of the artworks are dealing with a historical context, so as I might suggest does yours. Some artists are referring to concrete events whilst other stays rather vague. Ones like to call this kind of art being politically engaged. Can we thus speak of political art? Do you even use this word?

DH: I avoid the use of such definitions because politics in art are often seen as an extension of political issues. This narrow room often pushes the artist into a field that is already deformed by all sorts of manipulations. Instead I see politics as an individual matter; politic is certainly relevant but just in order to find a different individual language. Addressing a political issue doesn’t make you a political artist but instead makes you an individual that is aware of the implication and impact of politics.

I was educated in a heavily politicized context, as we all know by now in countries like Cuba political awareness is a form of currency and you always carry it in your pockets. When I moved to Europe I realized that here artists are rather more interested in politics than in socio-political issues, that explained many things to me, suddenly many artworks that I only knew from books started making sense. This understanding produced an important shift in my work; suddenly after a couple of years traveling through Europe I started seeing art content as a form of socio-political content. Any form of critical discourse should happen from the arts and must shake the fundaments of its history but if what we are looking for is a real political engagement, we must change the field of operations.

The translation of a socio-political event into an artwork is like pouring an extreme volatile substance into an open container, the particles go into the air, you can smell them but can’t see them. Basically any artwork can be that container for any kind of ´substance´, sometimes the substances are toxic and sometimes they are just nice fragrances.

JS: You were born in Cuba, being raised in a Socialist system, most likely facing political harsh circumstanced like absence of freedom of speech. Your work ´Mother the future was a political lie…´ seems to resort to your personal experiences of the past. But still, given that the viewer is unaware of your origin, the work gains a ubiquitous meaning, being substitutional for a single viewer. Does your past still affect your works or do you avoid connections to your biography.

DH: Biographical aspects are still relevant in my actual practice; I see them as an important source especially when I develop solo presentations. Certain events in my life continuously give me ideas and help me with the articulation of stories that are the base for complex presentations. My actual condition, that one of being away from the place I was born, is not alien to many people with different political and social backgrounds. Sometimes memory is the only tool we have if we want to keep connection with the place we were born. I am aware that memory can also anchor you in the middle of a distorted sea where truth and fiction behave like two good friends. In my case distance gives me the space I need in order to reflect about my position as an individual. When I was still living in Cuba I thought I was isolated from the rest of the world but the truth is that you are never isolated if you are close by the place you were born. After living for ten years abroad I realized that I am now truly isolated, I live only from an for my art and it is because this condition that I have found a different country, a country without president and also without land.

JS: Do you think that many contemporary artists have adopted a teleological way of self-affirmation, saying ´this is art because it is art! A renaissance of L´art pour L´art?

DH: It is hard to put contemporary artists in such general affirmation, but it is indeed a very interesting question at least for the times we are living today. I remember having a conversation with Pepe Cobo (Spanish art dealer, for more than 25 years gallery owner in Madrid). In this conversation he remarked how bored he was of answering the same question for 25 years of fairs and gallery public activities. The question was a very simple formulation: Why do you think this is art? In general, people confront contemporary art with certain scepticism, they are suspicious and they believe artists wants to fool around with them. They either ask the dealer or themselves: Why should I take this seriously? Why should I even think of contributing with such joke?

I have lived until now in different countries with totally different understandings of what art could be. This topic is extremely subjective; it varies even inside the same country. If you daily dedicate yourself to one thing and if you live from it, that’s what you do and what you are as a professional, all the rest is pure speculation. There are different models and certainly very complex practices and most important many strategies of survival. A contemporary artist is in general a very busy individual doing many different things in order to do and support the thing that matters, his or her art.

I guess artists as any other person can get tired of being asked the same question and most important we can get very impatient when people push us every time to the same corner. Just imagine people asking the baker every morning: Hello Mr. X, could you explain me why this is a bread? I am sure the answer will be very obvious:

-You are in a bakery; I am a baker and that, yes, what you have in your hands is called bread. We can seat over breakfast, eat couple of those together with some butter and jam on top and you’ll see how magically you’ll realize: Oh my god you are right, this is bread!

A work of art is a trajectory and in its inner core contains lots of different experiences that sometimes are evident and visible and in some other cases are hidden and demands from us understanding and also certain knowledge. There are many things that can be questioned when it comes to the reading of an artwork but once you start questioning the identity itself of an artwork you can be sure that no one else has already censored any further understanding of it but yourself. I would accompany the affirmation you have formulated in your question with couple of other things: This is art and not just because is art but because I am an artist and my work as a contemporary artist is precisely to shake your understanding of things and to move you from where you stand now to an another area, to that place where nothing is certain and only few things must be taken for granted.

A utopia yet to be created, an unfinished design, a monument-atopy, a map without places: Who could respond with certainty? Diango Hernández’s installation for the Arqueológica exhibition poses more than one question and seems to establish itself as a Sphynx-like puzzle of Greco-Roman-style inspiration, at the very heart of darkness of a glorious civilization in decline, unable to breath again, lacking imagination to formulate new utopias, paralyzed by the fear of failure. Foundation is the word that comes to mind, and it is not strange that it be thus, dealing with an exhibition whose theme is not only current but necessary for the undertaking of this urgent descent into darkness. What is archaeology, in short, and what purpose does it serve to dig in search of remains? What mechanisms drive objects given to darkness, and what sort of work might reactivate them? What sort of vision do they proffer up? What sort of knowledge arises from contact with these objects, from either the sensory experience had or the knowledge that we carry inside ourselves or the projection in space of the purpose for which they were designed? How does one reactivate the past in the present? Archaeology is a transversal science spanning all of man’s knowledge about mankind, because it doesn’t just seek depth- that negative space that defines that which cannot be seen, which no state of mind can do.

Gestures that scrutinize gestures, knowledge of what is tactile, material, where distance is dizzily banished. Conjuring up a presence, inventing the possibility of imagining that negative space in which there are no words, nor body, nor image- only the complete and joyful loneliness of being without sorrow or joy. We are mummies who have been denied a face, beings without insight, lost souls in search of redemption. We’ve lost contact with our ancestors, we do not see the future because we’ve lost all notion of the past. First stratum: Trip to Cologne, 2008. Diango and Anne enthusiastically recommend a visit to Kolumba, the Art Museum of the Cologne Archdiocese. More than a trip through time, it means the possibility of articulating two different verb tenses in the same sentence. We talk about language. About foundations. And transmission. I’m struck especially, in the midst of so much beauty and pain, amidst so much perplexity, by a piece by Paul Thek, a suspended table, a coffin, another mummy. I return home. A few months later, the news that the Historical Archive of the City of Cologne has collapsed and with it, documents (some forming part of the foundation of German culture itself), which are lost forever. Teams of archaeologists work amongst the wreckage of this surreal contemporary ruin. What good are archives, anyway? And what is memory but a fragile membrane, a porous eardrum, wrappings marking the body of a mummy. Question mark.

Second stratum: Memory / History. LESTORY (LESSONS IN HISTORY) Is, like all of Diango Hernández’s projects, a complex construct comprising different layers of meaning. There is a clear link between archaeology and contemporary art on several levels of depth and understanding, not the least of which is a shared belief in the wisdom of the body and the sensibility of the hands, touch, knowledge through contact, through transmission. Diango Hernández responded to the challenge presented to him by the curator of Arqueológica in the most complex way imaginable, because he doesn’t approach the subject from the point of view of an unearthed archaeological remain, nor does he do it from the comfort of the organization provided by an archive or a reserve, but from the paradigm of the romantic ruin, as a subjective projection. I imagine the installation as a ruin in the future, an archaeological find. A vestige. The work of Diango Hernández is always what is seen and what is not seen. The viewer is offered a trip through space and time; it is a temporal work. It offers a vision of both the future and the past, simultaneously. Like a drawing. At this point we come to understand the reference to Caspar David Friedrich. What point of view should we take? Using the body or using the head? Using memory or forgetfulness? The image is a projection and history a screen. The artist’s installation is a threshold piece that embodies a threshold, a border, and a crossing. In it there are two lines that cross through all of Diango Hernández’s thinking, which I would call the foundations or, to be more precise, a key concern and a foundational feature. The first is education, from the Latin e-ducere, “to lead out”. Education understood as a path, a road in the open, without a predetermined destination. The second is the conviction that nothing can be done without awareness of origin, without working on memory. That link, that connection between concept, action, and consequence, is therefore made functional, shall we say, by drawing. However, drawing here is not understood in any other sense than that of capacity for or competence in creation. Drawing as a field of freedom and individual constitution. Drawing also as the possibility to subvert the order of things or to create dialogue between the lines of history. But, at the same time, drawing as a privileged means of education, as a form of control and tool for the writing of history. It is no coincidence that Diango Hernández refers so often to academic drawing, especially drawing of the human figure.

Third (and last) stratum: This unique image, in black and white and on a slightly inclined plane, brings us to the installation in the painting and sculpture hall that the architect Lina Bo Bardi designed in the 60s for the Museum of Art of São Paulo: a landscape of ghosts who passed through the mesh of history- a project in transparency, in time in a spiral. A clean political gesture. Art is for everyone, because only the pursuit of freedom can produce individuality.

 Thanks so much to: José de Gimarães, Maria Castel-Branco, Nuno Faria and the wonderful staff of Arqueológica

Text published in the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Arqueológica’. Curated by Virginia Torrente. Matadero, Madrid 25.01.2013 – 12.05.2013
Exposición en torno a una arqueología contemporánea de las ruinas del presente. La investigación del pasado aporta muchos datos para conocer el presente. Sociedad, historia, religión, política y economía se ven englobados en la arqueología, donde encontramos vestigios de todo lo anterior. La evolución del hombre y las diferentes sociedades que ha ido conformando a lo largo de los tiempos está recogida en el subsuelo, o a la vista, entre la realidad y la mentira. Desde las excavaciones más antiguas a los trabajos de archivo y documentación de una historia más cercana al momento presente ¿por qué no englobar en una arqueología contemporánea la información que llega hasta la era de exploración interplanetaria? Así y todo, no hay que ir tan lejos, ya que un trabajo de carácter arqueológico puede suceder a la vuelta de la esquina, con motivo de una obra en nuestra ciudad. La expedición al lugar de la ruina, existente u oculta, genera un modo de trabajo de gran interés. La investigación previa a la prospección, junto con los años posteriores de análisis de los objetos encontrados, son un largo proceso que pocas veces se cierra definitivamente, dado que un hallazgo conduce a otro en un área como es la arqueología donde los momentos históricos se van solapando, y los nuevos descubrimientos, que pueden suceder en otros lugares, siempre aportan información complementaria en paralelo. Los estudios arqueológicos son un referente indudable a la memoria del lugar, de las personas que lo habitaron, de los sucesos que tuvieron lugar en el sitio que ahora es espacio de revisión e investigación. Bajo estos parámetros se mostrarán los trabajos-instalaciones de arte contemporáneo específicamente creados por 8 artistas de talla internacional en la Nave 16 del espacio de Matadero, Madrid, entre las fechas 25 enero 2013 – 12 mayo 2013.

Artistas participantes en Arqueológica:
Christian Andersson. Estocolmo, Suecia, 1973
Pedro Barateiro. Almada, Portugal, 1979
Mariana Castillo Deball. México DF, México, 1975
Mark Dion. New Bedford, Massachusetts, EEUU, 1961
Daniel Guzmán. México DF, México, 1964
Diango Hernández. Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, 1970
Regina de Miguel. Málaga, España 1977
Francesc Ruiz. Barcelona, España 1971

Download Exhibition ‘Arqueológica’. Publication

This exhibition invites behind the backstage of a truth and fiction, there, where the immaterial and ephemeral corresponds with the sensual and imagined; where the real and unreal, the present and absent collide in shaping a habitat of the phenomenal, magical and irrational. The Castle acts as a phenomenological frame of fiction and fantasy; a test for a capacity of senses, a medium and an illusion, a haunted place of specters and half-shadows, swirled in their hysterical dances, innocent sun-lights and absent protagonists in a search of a master-narrative and a cancelled spectacle of history; here, the mechanics of wonder and a mystery of a day-dream generate an eurhythmics of ephemerality and enigma –in a roller coaster of  appearance and disappearance, lightness and transparency, delirium of delusion. A cloud, a mist, a veil, a mirror reflection of a blurred silhouette at a distance, a choral music, echoed in an endless corridor – these are the enchanted landscapes of mind and body, sites and props of suspended disbelief and resistance. The artists, invited to this exhibition, consider architecture as a psychological construct and a deranged partner. Their poetic works (woven of image, sound and light) analyze subconscious layers of a historical space and perception. As a labyrinth of lost identity, “THE CASTLE IN THE AIR. Séance of Imagination” constructs a history of an unfulfilled desire and collective hallucination; an ultimate (desperate) attempt at writing a new (re-imagined) history.

Artists: Kai Altoff, Francis Alys, Michel Blazy, Ulla Von Brandenburg, Fernando Sanchez Castillo, Thea Djordjadze, Cecilia Edefalk, Tim Eitel, Cerith Wyn Evans, Spencer Finch, Adrian Ghenie, Jos De Gruyter and Harald Thys, Joao Maria Gusmao and Pedro Paiva, Diango Hernández, Ann Veronica Jannsens, Sergej Jensen, Dorota Jurczak, Tomasz Kowalski, Gabriel Kuri, Elad Lassry, Maria Loboda, Ursula Mayer, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Navid Nuur, Susan Philipsz, Josef Strau, Javier Tellez.

Poznan, Poland. Centre of Culture ZAMEK, November 22 – December 22, 2012

image: Wind, Diango Hernández 2012. courtesy of Centre of Culture ZAMEK and the artist

How are you today? I hope fine, I am Dr. Christopher Harrison from Harlesden, North West London, here in England. I work for Credit Suisse Bank London. I am writing you from my office which will be of a great immense benefit for both of us. In my department, being the assistant manager (Greater London region), I discovered an abandoned sum of $16.5 Million Pound (Sixteen Million Five hundred Thousand Pound sterling) in an account that belongs to one of our foreign customers Late Mr. Moses
Saba, a Jew from Mexico that was a victim of a helicopter crash early this year, killing him and family members. Saba was 46-years-old. Also in the chopper at the time of the crash was his wife, their son Avraham (Albert) and his daughter-in-law. The pilot was also dead. This is the beginning of what Dr. Christopher Harrison wrote not only to me but provably also to you…

Years ago I used to think -life is filled with surprisingly funny surprises. For example if I would have gotten the same letter from Dr.
Christopher Harrison from Harlesden 20 years ago I would have immediately believed in it and without a single doubt I would have answered him with a very polite and enthusiastic hand written letter. Today mine / ours mailboxes are jammed with ‘funny’ surprises and with terrific false news that go directly to our junk mailboxes, yes into this little container that is full of huge lotteries rewards to be immediately collected, millionaire transactions that we will receive soon, free wonderful sex and some other amusements. Our junk mailboxes are astonishing imaginary places stuffed with tenting promises of a better life. All we have to do is to CLICK, as simple as that, with a very elemental move of our index finger we’ll get there, probably if we CLICK we would meet Dr. Christopher Harrison whom would be waiting for
us at the Victorian station ready to hand us a huge leather suitcase fill with $16.5 Million Pound.

Out of my junk mailbox I have created ‘Drawing the Human Figure’ an exhibition that most of all connects under the same roof Hope, Waste and Lines. The most reasonable way to talk about this exhibition is maybe with the following equation:

H+ L/W = Ba-p*

H= HOPE
L= LINES
W= WASTE
Ba-p= Believe again – please

Diango Hernandez
Düsseldorf 2012

Il progetto Cretto, che giunge con Diango Hernández alla sua seconda mostra, è stato concepito concettualmente a partire da per il luogo in cui viene presentato: la Fondazione Brodbeck a Catania, in Sicilia. Il progetto ha avuto un lungo tempo di maturazione che ha incluso viaggi di preparazione, varie sessioni di lavoro con i responsabili artistici della Fondazione e ore di discussione con gli artisti che saranno presentati durante i prossimi tre anni. L’obiettivo iniziale al quale abbiamo tenuto fede, era quello di proporre un progetto che in qualche modo fosse complementare al progetto Fortino1 curato da Helmut Friedel e Giovanni Iovane e che presentasse artisti provenienti dal sud Europa o dall’America Latina (Portogallo, Cuba, Brasile) i cui interventi devono essere preceduti da un periodo di residenza a Catania. Se il titolo del progetto evoca inevitabilmente lo spirito e l’energia mitologica del luogo ricordando un doppio momento/monumento contemporaneo, fondatore del concetto di memoria quale incaricata a preservare e trasmettere l’energia nel tempo, esso si riferisce, allo stesso tempo, al significato letterale della parola: crepa, intervallo, taglio.

Nuno Faria
Curatore indipendente. Vive e lavora tra Lisbona e Loulé, Algarve, Portogallo. Curatore di MOBILEHOME, scuola d’arte nomade, sperimentale e indipendente a Loulé. Professore del corso di Arti Visive all’Università dell’Algarve e al Master in fotografia all’Istituto Politecnico di Tomar. Direttore artistico dell’International Center for the Arts José de Guimarães che aprirà prossimamente, Guimarães, capitale europea della cultura 2012.

INAUGURAZIONE DOMENICA 25 MARZO 2012 h. 11
DURATA MOSTRA: 27 MARZO – 26 MAGGIO 2012

INAUGURAZIONE DOMENICA 25 MARZO 2012 h. 11
DURATA MOSTRA: 27 MARZO – 26 MAGGIO 2012

In collaboration with Benveniste Contemporary, Madrid

(Italian version)

Il cranio, struttura ossea dura e rigida, è la forma che rende tutte le teste relativamente uguali. Chiaramente esistono varie forme di cranio: ci sono uomini con una scatola cranica lunga e uomini con un cranio largo e, inoltre, il cranio varia nella forma in base alla sua provenienza geografica. Ma, nella sua essenza, il cranio può essere ridotto, genericamente, alla forma piatta di un ovale e, nel suo volume, alla forma di un uovo. Questa generalizzazione, variabile all’estremo, è ancora la più usata nel disegnare la prima caratteristica strutturale di una testa. Questo è ciò che Arthur Zaidenberg ha scritto nel capitolo “The Head”, nel suo libro intitolato “Drawing the Human Figure”.

“Come stai oggi? Spero bene, io sono il Dr. Christopher Harrison di Harlesden, Nord Ovest di Londra, qui in Inghilterra. Lavoro per la Credit Suisse Bank di Londra. Ti scrivo dal mio ufficio, cosa che sarà di immenso beneficio per entrambi. Nel mio dipartimento, ricoprendo io la carica di assistant manager (nella regione della Greater London), ho scoperto una somma abbandonata pari a 16.5 milioni di pound (sedici milioni e cinquecento mila sterline) in un conto che appartiene ad uno dei nostri clienti stranieri, il defunto Mr. Moses Saba, un ebreo messicano, vittima di un incidente in elicottero, avvenuto all’inizio di quest’anno, che ha ucciso lui e i membri della sua famiglia. Saba aveva 46 anni. Al momento dell’incidente, nell’elicottero si trovavano anche sua moglie, suo figlio Avraham (Albert) e sua nuora. Anche il pilota è deceduto.” Questo è l’inizio di una lettera che il Dr. Christopher Harrison scrisse non solo a me, ma probabilmente anche a te/voi.

Anni fa avrei pensato che la vita è piena di buffe sorprese. Per esempio, se avessi ricevuto la stessa lettera dal Dr. Christopher Harrison di Harlesdem vent’anni fa, avrei subito creduto che fosse vera e, senza alcun dubbio, gli avrei risposto con una lettera gentile e piena di entusiasmo. Oggi, la mia e la vostra posta elettronica sono intasate da false sorprese e da terribili notizie infondate che arrivano direttamente tra gli spam; sì, arrivano in questi piccoli contenitori pieni di infiniti premi della lotteria che devono essere subito ritirati, transazioni milionarie o del fantastico sesso gratuito; un posto straordinario pieno di allettanti promesse per una vita migliore. Tutto ciò che dobbiamo fare sta in un CLICK, più semplice di così, e con un movimento elementare del tuo dito indice tutto ciò si avvererà, probabilmente riuscirai addirittura ad incontrare il Dr. Christopher Harrison, il quale ti aspetterà alla Victoria Station con una gigantesca borsa di pelle piena di 16.5 milioni di pound.

A partire dagli spam che ricevo, ho creato ‘Drawing the Human Figure’, una mostra che unisce sotto lo stesso tetto – Speranza, Spreco e Linee. Forse, l’equazione che segue rappresenta il modo più ragionevole per parlare di questa mostra: S+ L/S = Ca-p*

* S= SPERANZA L= LINEE S=SPRECO Ca-p= Credi ancora, per favore
Diango Hernandez
Düsseldorf 2012

Certainly there are plenty of meaningful places where I could present my work. In the last years I have been confronted with challenging situations of many kinds, with difficult spaces and very diverse audiences, but just the idea of exhibiting again in Havana, thrills me and moves me to a very difficult zone, straight into the zone where my emotions still live hidden.

What to do? What idea should I develop for this very special occasion? That’s a very good question that artists are very often confronted with. This time the question got a bit more complicated for me. I know I want to be there but I also know that I want to be invisible while being there; I want to be seen as if I have never left the island, as if all these years that I have been away are just an instant, a flash.

For a couple of years, on the 1st of January I take morning walks over the shores of the Rhine River. Early in those mornings you can see lots of interesting things lying around the proximities of the Oberkassel Bridge. In the meadows near by there are lots of empty fireworks artifacts and lots of empty champagne bottles. These are all the remnants of the New Year’s Eve celebrations.

Throughout these walks I have collected many champagne metal caps that have been smashed by the overexcited crowd that gathers every year in these shadowy and freezing cold meadows. The caps are precarious pieces of metal, they are ‘blind’ sculptures modeled by masses of people and they are the central elements of my imaginary presentation in the next Havana Biennial.

‘The Foam Collector’ (El coleccionista de espuma) is my imaginary collector in Havana, he performs since many years the difficult task of collecting something that grows enormously and has the capacity of developing into infinite beautiful shapes. However he needs still to solve a very important issue for his collection: when all the bubbles disappear, what remains in his frames and vitrines is just water.

Project in collaboration with Blood Mountain Foundation, Budapest

But water, in all its forms―liquid flood, steamlike evaporation, crystal-like ice―was the point of Hernández’s show. See the suit of nine framed works on paper, Crsitales, 1936 (all works 2011), which opened the exhibition in one long, even row. The elegantly modern black-and-white prints of heavy and decorous Villeroy & Boch crystals goblets and glasses―arranged on tabletops like classically commercial rejoinders to Giorgio Morandi’s more abstracted assemblages of vases―were taken from a 1936 German catalogue. Besides the framing, Hernández’s touch could be located in the delicate pools of translucent watercolor that filled many of the glasses with lemon, sky blue, and rusty orange. Farther down the wall hung a set of larger, watercolor-on-linen paintings, from a series titled ‘Humid Memories,’ 2011-, the same bright colors illuminating their brown-linen grounds. Here the color assumed the form of cloudlike stains, hovering and blossoming from the canvases’ centers. It was as if a painting by Paul Klee and Marc Chagal had been distilled of both figure and form until just color―ever so subtle, without gesture―remained, gorgeously spectral yet oddly specific.

This channeling of European modernism through a contemporary Cuban mentality continued with ‘Crystal Clear’ 2011, a series of white pedestals situated in the gallery’s center, whose classicism was complicated by the objects they supported. Each contained a niche that held a heavy crystal decanter filled with candy-colored water, suggesting green, orange, or yellow liquor. Emerging from a hole in the top of the pedestals were rolled-up book pages torn from a catalogue of bronze figures by early-twentieth-century German sculptor Georg Kolbe. This strange plumage and the pedestal themselves were lovely and autonomous, despite the assembly. Like Hernández’s watercolors come to life, they took their simulacral status seriously. Meanwhile, slightly shabbier, more provisional works filled the back room. In Studio Monument, an old brown couch turned vertically against a wall reveled a lightbulb inside it shining through the worn velveteen like a satin (an echo of the paintings on linen). My Bottle of Rum, an old-fashioned record player also turned sideways, was topped with a piece of illuminated crystal, perhaps a device for seeing the future (or the past).

The exhibition’s backstory is pertinent: It involves the flooding of Cuban artist Florencio Gelabert’s studio, and a water-damaged drawing that Hernández bought some years later. But this story―like the too-pointed titles of numerous works on view (After Raining, Muddy floor and the series ‘Humid memories’ ) and the show’s title itself, ‘Crystal Clear’―seemed reductive, given that a less literal kind of watery transformation and slipperiness of meaning, event, and material was perceptible throughout. Why wash the works of their mystery? Hernández say the ‘found object’ as an art-historical concept does not exist where he was raised. In Cuba, each object is by necessity ‘provisional,’ on its way to its second or third act. Water, steam, ice.

Latimer, Quinn – Artforum (March 2012). 292-293

All diesen Schwerpunkten zum Trotz: Marl liegt nicht auf der ständigen Route der Kunstinteressierten. Und so hat sich denn Elben, der auch seiner Kompetenz in Sachen Neue Medien wegen nach Marl gerufen wurde, sogleich daran gemacht, ein eigenes Konzept zu entwickeln, um die überraschend hochkarätige Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst aus ihrem inzwischen eher verschlafenen Zustand zu wecken und für die nähere Zukunft erst einmal “in Bewegung” zu setzen. Was diesen inzwischen in vielen Häusern praktizierten Versuch zur Revitalisierung in Marl nun auf gelungene Weise akzentuiert, ist dabei nicht einmal nur der von Etappe zu Etappe mit Leihgaben aus anderen Häusern erweiterte Dialog der Werke untereinander, sondern vor allem die Rhythmisierung der “Bewegung” durch eine Folge von Einzelausstellungen aus dem bisweilen erfrischend unkonventionellen Geist der Sammlung. Hoffnungsvolle Aussichten, das entschieden zur Gewöhnung tendierende Dauerhafte von Sammlungspräsentationen eben auch durch temporäre Setzungen herauszufordern.

Gleich in der zweiten Runde bietet Diango Hernandez mit “Lonely Fingers” einen Höhepunkt. Es ist eine höchst intime Installation, die er eigens für das Museum geschaffenen hat. Sie besetzt einen hell erleuchteten Raum im Untergeschoss, der aus dem weitgehend abgedunkelten Bereich zur Inszenierungen der in dieser Runde stark von Licht-, Medien- und Tonarbeiten geprägten Sammlungsrunde heraus fällt. Ob das in dieser Situation zunächst als nahezu gleißend erfahrene Licht eher lockt oder verschreckt, ist anfangs schwerlich auszumachen. Verblüffend allemal die nahezu asketische Raumbesetzung, die erst dann ihre ganze Opulenz offenbart, wenn die ‘lonly fingers’ in Aktion treten.

Im ideellen Zentrum steht eine eigens eingezogene weiße Wand, auf der zunächst eine seltsame Konstellation von gebrochenen Backsteinen ins Auge fällt. Die paarweise angeordneten Bruchstücke verbinden unterschiedlich dicke Saiten. Kenner werden sie alsbald als Gitarrensaiten identifizieren. Tatsächlich handelt es sich um die für Gitarren geläufige Anzahl von sechs, welche die im gewöhnlichen Alltag untauglichen, weil gebrochenen Backsteinpaare auf der Wand der “Lonely Fingers” vier mal in vertikaler und zwei mal in horizontaler Richtung verbinden und so diesen ‘Klangkörper’ auf ebenso minimale wie subtile Weise rhythmisieren. Den Aktionsradius der ‘lonely fingers’ geben die Löcher in der Wand vor, je eines etwa auf halber Strecke neben den Saiten. Durch diese erschaffen sie von hinten gemeinsam eine je eigene Komposition – und agieren doch jeder für sich alleine in einer Situation zwischen komischem Theater und klandestiner Aktion. Die ‘Besitzer’ der Finger, deren Zahl und Dynamik das Werk von Fall zu Fall opulent, aggressiv, heiter oder verhalten, immer aber temporär, flüchtig und fern jeder vorgegebenen Regie gestalten, bleiben unsichtbar. Wenn niemand zupft, dann herrscht Schweigen an diesem Ort zwischen Dunkelheit und Licht, der eine polyvalente Energie zwischen poetischer Fülle und schmerzlicher Leere verstrahlt.

Gesteigert wird diese durch die zehn Bronzefinger, die auf der gegenüberliegenden Wand fünf Glasplatten halten. Nichts stört die Glasplatten, nichts belastet die Finger. Zudem ist es zehn mal derselbe Zeigefinger mit gülden glänzender Fingerkuppe. Lediglich die minimal variierte Verankerung in der Wand verhilft all diesen erstarrten Zeugen menschlicher Handlungen zu einer vermeintlichen Individualität.

Und tatsächlich im räumlichen Zentrum ein Stück aus der hauseigenen Sammlung: Es ist die Bronzehand von Paul Gauguin, die der Künstlernachfahre aus ihrem Dämmerzustand unter einer Glashaube auf einem Sockel ins strahlende Licht seiner ‘lonely fingers’ versetzt. Natürlich schweigt sie sich dort aus wie so viele Werke aus vergangenen Epochen, auch solche, denen Museen einen zentralen Platz einräumen. Es gibt in dieser Installation auch keinerlei Hinweis darauf, was es mit diesem ‘Fundstück’ auf sich hat. Es kommt so oder so auf Umwegen heraus. Zudem sind es ja nicht die Objekte – weder die aus dem Alltag noch die aus der Kunst –, die für sich alleine Bedeutung schaffen. Es sind die Hände, die vom Kopf, von den Sinnen und im besten Falle von der Imagination gesteuerten Werkzeuge des Menschen, die Objekte schaffen, gebrauchen, verbrauchen, wegwerfen, wieder auflesen, versetzen und im schönsten übertragenen Sinne begreifen oder auch zerstören.

“Dies sei kunsthistorisch wohl die erste signierte eigene Hand aus Künstlerhand”, so der damalige Museumsleiter Rüth anlässlich des Erwerbs dieses seltenen Stücks. So wie sie Hernandez, dem jede genialische Auffassung vom Künstlerdasein fremd ist, hier unter die ‘lonely fingers’ reiht, erweist sie sich als eines unter vielen Fundstücken, denen weder die Kunstgeschichte noch irgendein von außen verordneter Kanon einen Rang zuweist. Was hier zählt, ist ihre Präsenz im Konzert und in der Stille aller ‘lonely fingers’.

Als Diango Hernandez in den 90er Jahren des vergangenen Jahrhunderts mit Freunden von der Akademie in Havanna das „Gabinete Ordo Armoris“ gründet, erfindet er einen Ort, der eine in der alltäglichen Wirklichkeit aufgelesene Sammlung nützlicher Dinge vorführt als jenes kreative Potential, das aus sich selbst heraus „entscheidet Kunstwerk zu werden“. Damals zielte das Projekt auf die lähmende Wirklichkeit der verordneten Revolution. Diese frühe Vision vom Museum als Ort der Aufbewahrung und Labor individueller Gestaltungsformen wie kreativer Koproduktion hat den kubanischen Kontext verlassen, ohne ihn doch gänzlich als Teil seiner längst globalen Konzeption auszugrenzen. Sie findet eben auch in Marl einen nachgerade exemplarischen Einsatzort. Ist es doch gerade die ‘Vielsprachigkeit’ dieser speziellen Sammlung zwischen traditionellem Werkverständnis und avancierten Vorstellungen, die auf einen unkonventionellen Einsatz warten könnte.

“Mit seinen Erfindungen setzt Hernández auf die Kraft des Künstlers, einen Dialog zwischen Welten zu schaffen, die dem Anschein nach nicht die Instrumente besitzen, um in Kontakt zueinander zu treten”, heißt es im Pressetext des Mart in Rovereto, das dem Künstler soeben seine umfassendste Einzelausstellung eingerichtet hat. Das käme der genialischen Imagination von “Ma main” – wie Gauguins Skulptur tatsächlich betitelt ist – verdächtig nahe. Nur so, wie hier alles still gestellt ist und ganz plötzlich auch wieder klingen kann, beweist diese intime Schau einmal mehr eine poetische Energie, an der alle Individuen teilhaben, deren Finger ‘noch’ leben. Sie sind es, die alleine oder in Gesellschaft die allen gemeinsamen Fragen in nachrevolutionären Gesellschaften aktivieren, deren Intensität Sammlungen bewegen kann.

An der Schwelle zwischen Sammlungs- und Ausstellungsraum hängen sechs gerahmte Papierarbeiten in unterschiedlicher Höhe von der Decke: Ein Mobile fantastischer Entwürfe von fliegenden oder schwebenden Strukturen, Zukunftsmaschinen aus einem Kabinett verlorener Träume. Signiert sind sie allesamt Blanco Lopez. Sie zählen zu den vielen Fundstücken im Werk, die jedes für sich in jeder neuen Konstellation zum Konzert der ‘lonely fingers’ beitragen – ganz so wie die vielen Worte und wenigen Sprichworte in einem wie beiläufig an die Wand gehefteten handschriftlichen Text aus der Zeichnungsmappe von Anni, einer Unbekannten: rätselhaft und zugleich vielstimmig präsent.

Zur Ausstellung erscheint ein Künstlerbuch.

Lonely FIngers. Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten, 18.12.11 – 12.02.12

Published in Kunstforum International. Band 214. March-2012

… For your exclusive pleasure, ladies and gentlemen our Good Neighbours, you that are now in Cuba, the most beautiful land human eyes have ever seen, as Christofry Columbus, The Discoverer, said once, you, happy visitors, are once and for all, welcome. WelCOME to Cuba! All of you… be WELLcome! Bienvenidos, as we say in our romantic language, the language of colonizadors and toreros (bullfighters) and very, very, but very (I know what I say) beautiful duennas. I know that you are here to sunbathe and seabathe and sweatbathe Jo jo jo… My excuses, thousand of apologies for You-There that are freezing in this cold of the rich, that sometimes is the chill of our coollness and the sneeze of our colds: the Air Conditioned I mean. For you as for every-one here, its time to get warm and that will be with our coming show. In fact, to many of you it will mean heat! And I mean, with my apologies to the very, very oldfashioned ladies in the audience, I mean, Heat. And when, ladies and gentlemen, I mean heat is HEAT!

Skulpturenmuseum Glaskasten Marl
18 Dec. 2011 – 12 Feb. 2012