Rodrigo Hernández
The Long Pond
ChertLüdde, Berlin
24 February – 2 April 2026

Since dreams can’t be pictures, picture a pond. A pond that’s longer than it is wide, with water lilies on its perimeter and two peninsulas protruding into the placid water. Paint this picture from memory, from daydream, desire.

At ChertLüdde, Rodrigo Hernández (b. 1983, Mexico City) presents The Long Pond, a new installation that invites viewers to linger within the artist’s memories. Wading into the liminal space between sleep and wakefulness, the installation stages an encounter that begins at ankle height and rises to eye level through a broken sequence of wall drawings and paintings.

Before entering this landscape, Hernández offers a map: a simple drawing of a four-mile-long glacial lake in Acadia National Park, Maine. This is The Long Pond, where the artist traveled with his partner in 2025. Hernández, whose practice often starts with a simple line drawing before expanding it into paintings, reliefs or sculptures, understands drawing as something “closer to memory, or more precisely, the sensation one has before remembering.”1 And by keeping this map of The Long Pond spare and tracing only the contours of the place, he allows memory to surface slowly, sensation giving way to images.

At the center of the exhibition, two bronze patinated casts rest on a large platform. These busts depict a couple, figures that mirror one another. Each presses one ear into a hand, poised as if at the threshold of sleep, even though their eyes remain open in search of the other’s gaze.

Hernández gives few points of orientation in this installation, but if you stay with the sculptures long enough, they begin to feel buoyant in time. Unmoored to a fixed temporality or the present moment, they allude to a slow drifting—toward and away from one another. Like the pared down diagram of the pond, the narrative is distilled to its barest elements: two figures floating across a surface, evoking distance, but also commonality. Their faces remain deliberately nondescript, reduced to near-generic features, hovering at the edge of recognition and functioning as placeholders for projection, reflection, or desire.

Almost identical and mirroring each other, the sculptures evoke an ancient Greek myth about desire. Cursed by unrequited love for himself, it is said Narcissus becomes trapped by a reflection he mistakes for another person, his perfect soulmate. Traditionally interpreted as a tale of vanity, the installation presents Narcissus as not just a character whose desire falls upon himself, but upon someone unattainable: his reflection. For Hernández though, the object of affection is unattainable through distance instead, as he reveals in writing.

In a text by the artist accompanying the exhibition, Hernández recalls his partner’s voice as he exits sleep, “‘I was wondering how quickly you will forget about me in Paris.’”2 The text frames this as the final moment before Hernández moved overseas. Yet the memory lingers less on the fact of departure itself than on the intimate, fleeting details that surrounded it. “I remember,” Hernández writes, “touching a wet fig leaf in the garden.”3 Such small, tactile gestures slow time, holding the moment in place by anchoring emotion in the body. These haptic memories, felt also in the oil paintings in the exhibition, insist on the physicality of longing, reminding the viewer that the exhibition’s emotional register is not abstract but intimately felt. Within this attention to touch lies an unspoken fear—that love, separated by distance, might thin out and dissolve, leaving behind nothing more than a fragile reflection.

Hernández has also drawn a mosaic floral pattern, inspired by the motif at the entrance to his new Paris studio, directly onto the wall, positioned low to the ground. This wall drawing traces the distance between then and now, there and here, Hernández and his partner—uniting them within the exhibition. Through this overlap, the exhibition lingers in an alternative dreamspace shaped by memory, intimacy, and the tenderness of farewell. In this refusal of resolution and narrative completion, the exhibition remains fragmented and resists closure. Quoting Patrick Modiano, Hernández offers such fragmentation as a site of release: “A great relief, that of being freed from the laws of gravity, as in dreams, when your body floats into the air or in the void.”4 Hernández takes this suspension, drifting his figures out from chronology and certainty; references slide rather than settle; images hover in a state of near-recognition. In the exhibition, The Long Pond is the void, an expanse that absorbs orientation and depth, where bodies and meanings seem to float rather than arrive.

In The Long Pond, Rodrigo Hernández frames time as a deeply personal, subjective experience, untethered from fixed social or cultural structures. Time stretches and folds here, shaped less by chronology than by desire, memory, and touch. The exhibition lingers in this in-between space, where tenderness resists closure and meaning remains provisional and held in motion, like a dream shared between two people across two places, rather than fixed in one.

Notes

1. Diego Villalobos in Rodrigo Hernández, with what eyes?, The Wattis Institute & DOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE, San Francisco/Berlin, 2025
2. Rodrigo Hernández, The Long Pond, 2026
3. Ibid.
4. Patrick Modiano, ‘Afterimage’ in Suspended Sentences: Three Novellas, trans. Mark Polizzotti, Yale University Press, 2014

Photos by Giorgia Palmisano MBP & Marjorie Brunet Plaza.

Biography

Rodrigo Hernández (1983, Mexico City, Mexico) lives and works in Mexico City and Paris. He studied at the Jan Van Eyck Academie, Maastricht after obtaining a BA at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Karlsruhe.

Working mostly with classical media and techniques of art making, including drawing, sculpture, engraving and painting, Hernández is interested in the constitutive movement of art and image making, from Meso-American iconography to contemporary art.

Selected solo exhibitions include: Tanya Bonakdar, New York (2025); Antenna Space, Shanghai (2024); Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2023); Künstlerhaus, Bremen (2023); Pakt, Amsterdam (2023); Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2023); Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2022); Swiss Institute Offsite, New York (2022); Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin, Medellin (2022); Kunsthalle Kohta, Helsinki (2021); Culturgest, Lisbon (2021); Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães, Guimarães (2021); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2020); Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City (2019); Kunsthalle Winterthur, Winterthur (2019); Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis (2019); Pivô, São Paulo (2018); Kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (2017); Heidelberger Kunstverein, Heidelberger (2016); Museo del Chopo, Mexico City (2015); Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2014).

Selected group exhibitions include: Museo Jumex, Mexico City (2025); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich (2025, 2017); Galeria Municipal do Porto, Porto (2024); Kunsthalle Münster, Münster (2024); Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Den Haag (2024); 12th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art, Gothenburg (2023); Museum of Contemporary Art of Monterrey, Monterrey (2022); Pinchuk Art Center, Kyiv (2019); Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2017); Kunstverein Nürnberg, Nürnberg (2017).