Rodrigo Hernández
J’aime Eva
15 September – 11 November 2017

ChertLüdde is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in the gallery with Mexican artist Rodrigo Hernández (b. 1983, Mexico City).
Hernández presents a new body of work reflecting upon collage as an art-technique and as a device from the historical avant-garde to represent and transform human relationship with reality.

The starting point is the summer following the invention of collage in 1912, when Picasso spent some weeks at Céret and Sorgues in the company of his lover, Eva (Marcelle Humbert). One of the experiments of this summer was the attempt to incorporate true relief and, in at least one case, an actual object on the canvas surface in the only collage Picasso seems to have executed during that summer, titled Guitar: J’aime Eva. This unusual work may have been partly inspired by a portrait by Henri Rousseau. The painting, titled Myself, Portrait and Landscape, portrays Rousseau in the costume of an “artist-peintre”, as he liked to call himself, complete with artist’s beret, palette and brush. Rousseau wrote the names of his two (then-deceased) wives, “Clèmence et Josephine,” upside-down on the palette in a naïve but moving tribute to his beloved muses. Picasso may have had this portrait in mind when he wrote to his dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler on 12 June 1912: “Marcelle is very sweet and I love her very much and I will write it on all my pictures.” The work which seems to correspond to this statement is Guitar: J’aime Eva. In its original form, which has been preserved only in photograph, Picasso wrote the words “Jaime Eva” in faux naïf, childlike handwriting.

The exhibition features eight three-dimensional objects integrating painting, drawing and collage on their surface. The gallery has been transformed into a space partially submerged under water, where the pieces appear to be floating.
Another sculpture one is greeted by right at the entrance of the gallery gives a general summary of this image: there, one sees a human face indecisively coming out or submerging itself in the water, integrated with a model of the gallery space; the water level draws a horizon line where the outside seems to meet the inside.

This moment of transition has a parallel in one of collage’s most fundamental principles: the transfer of material from one context to another and its arrangement in order to produce a new reality, whose coherence follows no other rules than those of a fabricated new logic.

Collage is said to be a subversion of all conventional figure-ground relationships and one of the most plastic materializations of the notions of difference and context, but most importantly it can be understood as an attempt to bring together life and work literally onto a same unique surface, determining and perhaps contradicting the distance between them.

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Rodrigo Hernández (Mexico City, Mexico, 1983) lives and works between Lisbon and Mexico City. He studied at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe with Silvia Bächli in 2010-2012, and at Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht in 2013-2014. In the last years he has been awarded with a residency at Laurenz-Haus Stiftung in Basel in 2015 and at Cité International des Arts in Paris in 2016. His recent solo exhibitions include: Plasma, Galeria Madragoa, Lisbon, 2017; The Shakiest of Things, Kim?, Riga, 2017; I am nothing, Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberg, 2016; Every forest madly in love with the moon has a highway crossing it from one side to the other, Kurimanzutto, Mexico City, 2016; El pequeño centro, Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, 2015; What is the moon?, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 2015; Go, gentle scorpio, Parallel Oaxaca, Oaxaca, 2014; A Sense of Possibility, Weingrüll, Karlsruhe, 2014. His recent group exhibitions include: Illusion and Revelation, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 2017; Pilger Mills, Kunstverein Nürnberg; Pélamide, Gladstone Gallery, Brussels, 2017; Neither, MendesWoodDM, Brussels, 2017; An ear, severed, listens, ChertLüdde, Berlin; 12th Bienal Femsa Monterrey, Monterrey, 2016-2017; Hyperconected – 5th Moscow Bienal for Young Art, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow, 2016; Um die Ecke denken, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich, 2016; Marriage, Queer Thoughts, New York, 2016; Jungs, hier kommt der Masterplan, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, 2016.

Rodrigo Hernández, “Ebba”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché, 36 × 30 × 15 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “Ebba”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché, 36 × 30 × 15 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “J’aime Eva”, 2017, Exhibition view at ChertLüdde, Berlin
Rodrigo Hernández, “J’aime Eva”, 2017, Exhibition view at ChertLüdde, Berlin
Rodrigo Hernández, “Ev’ha”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché, 45 × 36.5 × 6 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “Ev’ha”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché, 45 × 36.5 × 6 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “Heva”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché, 38 × 31.5 × 10 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “Heva”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché, 38 × 31.5 × 10 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “Ebah”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché, 46 × 29 × 7 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “Ebah”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché, 46 × 29 × 7 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “J’aime Eva”, 2017, Exhibition view at ChertLüdde, Berlin
Rodrigo Hernández, “J’aime Eva”, 2017, Exhibition view at ChertLüdde, Berlin
Rodrigo Hernández, “Eva”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché 30 × 35 × 17 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “Eva”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché 30 × 35 × 17 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “Heba”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché, 41 × 30 × 7.5 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “Heba”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché, 41 × 30 × 7.5 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “Evá”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché 29 × 19 × 9 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “Evá”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché 29 × 19 × 9 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “He-b-a”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché, 55 × 15 × 7 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, “He-b-a”, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, papier-maché, 55 × 15 × 7 cm
Rodrigo Hernández, J’aime Eva, 2017, Oil color, acrylic, wood, colour pencil, papier-maché, model: 19 × 34 × 14 cm

Rodrigo Hernández エビ (EBI), 2017 Room installation Sculpture: papier-maché, drawing on paper, wood, acrylic 45 × 100 × 0.5 cm

Rodrigo Hernández, “J’aime Eva”, 2017, Exhibition view at ChertLüdde, Berlin