Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Sin título [Untitled]

Image caption
SECUNDINO HERNÁNDEZ

Sin título [Untitled]

  • 2011
  • Acrylic, pencil and fillers on canvas
  • 162 x 132 cm
  • Cat. P_776
  • Acquired in 2013
By:
Jorge Pallarés

This painting was part of the ‘Raw, Mid Raw’ exhibition at the Nuno Centeno gallery in Portugal in 2011. The exhibition took place just when Secundino Hernández made his great breakthrough internationally, when several of his works were purchased by the prestigious US Rubell Family Collection. This opened many doors for the up-and-coming artist from Madrid.

Secundino Hernández plunged into the Spanish pictorial tradition, on which he drew and within which he positioned himself with bravery, courage and humility as a legitimate follower and continuator. References to artists of the ilk of El Greco, Velázquez, Goya, Zurbarán and even Picasso are often found in his works. His paintings start from drawings, notes and ideas that gradually take form. Small doses of colour are injected which act like adjectives in a poem, providing volume to the masterstrokes of his compositions. Stormy gestures are accommodated in a space that generally lacks a message, where painting shows all its strength as part of the mainstream art establishment.

This piece is part of a series of works where his fondness for the schematic use of lines in the style of Alberto Giacometti can be clearly seen. He delves into the heart of painting to fight a battle with a blank canvas, dominate it, subject it and take it to the world where ideas lie. The unfinished texts and fragments of different materials affixed to the canvas are the remains of that struggle, where Secundino Hernández yet again comes out triumphant.

Jorge Pallarés

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Secundino Hernández
Madrid 1975

Secundino Hernández is a Spanish painter who graduated in Fine Arts from the Complutense University of Madrid (2000). In 2005 and 2006 he was a scholar at the Spanish Academy in Rome and a year later he won the Caja Madrid 2007 Generation Prize. His work explores the possibilities of painting by examining its essential elements: line, form and colour. Hernández has gradually created a fundamentally visual language in which each of those elements is studied in detail. Thus, his work ranges from palette squares to compositions where lines predominate. He has worked with oil, watercolour and charcoal. In keeping with the above, his painting is spontaneous and immediate only in appearance: research cannot be done ad hoc. Thus, Hernández’s work is based on meticulous forethought and draws on a delicate technical precision to transfer the sketch to the fabric; he sometimes includes written texts in his works as a syntactic structure for organisation, thus incorporating the process of execution into the work itself.

Hernández’s work has mainly been exhibited in Spain at solo shows at the Heinrich Ehrhardt Gallery in Madrid since 2006, such as the one in which he unveiled his series dedicated to El Greco’s Apostles in 2013; and internationally in galleries in Vienna, Helsinki, Porto, Berlin, Frankfurt and London. He took part in the La Paz Biennial (2007) and recently exhibited at the Maison Louis Carré (Bazoches-sur-Guyonne, France, 2014), the National Sculpture Museum in Valladolid (2014) and at the YUZ Museum (Shanghai, 2015).

Roberto Díaz

 
«Raw, mid raw» (Lisbon, 2011).
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 2.