Long Time Coming

Dear Kuya Rick,
I was shocked when i saw the latest entry on your site. The title of your first one-man show is the same title i've been saving all these years for my first one-man show, hahah! YOU YOU!! Just kidding. Anyway, as a support (and added pressure *evil laugh - inagaw mo title ko*) this entry wishes you a successful one-man! Congrats in advance. :)


Dear friends, cyber friends, everyone :) -- come and visit Rick Hernandez's Long Time Coming on August 9 at Galerie OneWorkshop, LRI Design Plaza, Makati City. I'm sure it'll be awesome. The title spells it. :)

Long Time Coming 

 

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 ofhistory 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.

 

 Oliver Ortega