Skarstedt is pleased to announce our first exhibition with Spanish artist Secundino Hernández. Comprising a suite of new paintings, this will also mark the artist’s debut solo exhibition in New York.
Part of the artist’s celebrated series of Washed paintings, which he began in 2016, these new works continue Hernández’s quest to get to the heart of painting by foregrounding the particularities of the medium. Emphasizing line, color, gesture, and application, Hernández’s oeuvre questions historical classifications of painting, underscoring the difficulty in defining what painting is.
After working within this series for the better part of a decade, the paintings on view in this exhibition mark a milestone in his practice, as they combine most of Hernández’s painterly language in a more dynamic, free, and mature way. The artist has been able to display all his techniques in a seamless artistic statement that comprises calligraphic trees and color fields within his innovative washed paintings. The transformative element that both ties together each piece and heralds their uniqueness within the series is the brightness and luminosity of the colors, and the meditative tone added to the brush strokes that leaves no room for a second revision, due to the immediate nature of his working method. These new colors are chosen intuitively, resulting in a group of paintings that is a triumph of color vibrating with intensity. This newfound use of color is at the core of the present exhibition, the hues full of emotion and ideas that are the starting point of an open dialogue with their viewers.
The Washed paintings are a physical act as well as a theoretical exercise. Hernández begins by covering every inch of the canvas with paint. Once this initial layer is complete, the artist “destroys” his work by erasing much of the paint with a high-powered pressure washer and varying levels of hot and cold water to achieve different effects. What remains is a turbulent dance reminiscent of Action Painting, or Yves Klein’s fire paintings—a site of growth and erasure that is almost ancient in its feel. Similar to Klein or Jackson Pollock, Hernández’s works expand the traditional field of painting into wider realms of performance or conceptual art, using new materials and techniques to paint the immateriality of time and space.
This tension between control and chaos, addition and subtraction, beauty and destruction, is tantamount to Hernández’s practice, and it provides a kind of beautiful open-endedness. Indeed, there exists a play between spontaneity and predetermination. While the final compositions are usually carefully mapped out in advance, the colors are chosen instinctively, and Hernández’s process leaves no room for revision—once the paint has been washed away, it’s gone from the canvas forever. In this way, there is an important element of chance that again evokes art historical precedents like Jean Arp or Ellsworth Kelly, while at the same time inviting unexpected revelations. In embracing the unknown, Hernández reminds us of the true essence of art—to provoke, to challenge, and ultimately, to inspire.
Through his questioning, Hernández is not necessarily hoping to leave himself or his viewers with set answers. Instead, the works on view in this exhibition allow for individual discovery, inviting new ways of seeing through each wash of paint.