Rodrigo Hernández: beautiful he stirs up still things

“The only true voyage… would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes… to see the hundred universes that each of them sees.” 

– Marcel Proust, The Captive / The Fugitive

The artist, lying in bed next to his partner, in a half-waked slumber, is sensing more than thinking. He is mystified at how they came to be together, sharing this quiet, unrushed moment. Peering out the window, he observes the last hours of sunlight as the day nears its conclusion. He turns to his lover, brings his face nearer with both hands, and while caressing his cheek with a flutter of eyelashes asks him, “Do you know what this is called?” ”No,” his partner replies. Even in this expression of closeness, he intuits the inherent opacity of the world. Perhaps the most defining aspect of phenomenological experience is our relative inaccessibility to one another. “My mum used to do this when I was a kid and she called it a butterfly kiss.” How does his partner perceive this moment? And what does a butterfly feel as it beats the air with its wings?

Rodrigo Hernández often begins conjuring an exhibition with such anecdotes and questions. Referencing diverse sources from Mexican pre-Columbian imagery, to European and Latin American modernisms, and global literature, philosophy and science, Hernández constructs surreal scenarios to speculate on the nuances of perception and the murky territory of memory and imagination. Not knowing is part of the pleasure in his epistemological and artistic explorations. Acknowledging that we don’t have many answers, his work suggests we may not even know enough to ask the right questions. However, the inquiry itself–more precisely, our avidness to connect to other living things–evokes a susceptibility to the idea, both curious and enticing, that we may not be so disconnected from each other.

For this two-part exhibition taking place at Bel Ami and Frieze Los Angeles, Rodrigo Hernández builds minimal dreamlike environments, each with just one painting, one sculpture and a site-specific pedestal display. In different ways, the art objects and platforms set the stage for an unexpected encounter with something both familiar and strange. Pedestals, low to the ground, resemble platform beds, supported by L-shaped plywood headboards. They are not for resting. Rather, they ask if in some sense we are already asleep, wandering through a waking dream. Upon each platform, a bronze sculpture of a human head rests on its side, reminiscent of Constantin Brâncusi’s ovoid Sleeping Muse, but here the representation is hollow, a vessel hoping to be filled.

On an adjacent wall, a small painting of an urban landscape is also turned on its side, rotated to a vertical orientation. Over this steep horizon, an image of a butterfly in repose; we can only hypothesize about its relationship to the city backdrop. On second glance, we realize the composition reflects a human point of view; we know that butterflies perceive a much wider palette, including ultra-violet and that they possess an inner magnetic feeling that allows them to navigate long distances and target extremely specific locations. A precise rendering, the painting retains a graphic, illustrative quality not unlike René Magritte, as if to remind us that this is not a window unto the world, only a picture… and yet perhaps a little more than that. 

All together, the arranged objects, along with the architectural platforms that shape the context and direct the flow through the exhibition space, might be said to resemble a whimsical model of human consciousness–a speculation on how our minds interact with the physical domain. Historically and in the present, many of these models of how our brain works–from filing cabinets to icebergs to CPUs–rather than shedding scientific light, elucidate more about what we don’t know. Socrates, famous for owning his own ignorance, suggests the mind is like an aviary full of wild birds, our untrapped thoughts aflutter. The two-fold exhibition by Hernández celebrates that special moment when a revelatory understanding is very near, but still eludes.