Tan ligero (So light)NoguerasBlanchard, Barcelona30th May – 26th July 2019

Rodrigo Hernandez presents his first Solo exhibition, Tan ligero (So light), in Spain. It is on view at NoguerasBlanchard, marking the last iteration of Margins of Ten, an exhibition cycle curated by Rosa Lleó in the gallery’s space. Inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’ celebrated film Powers of Ten (1975), it proposes different approaches to the margins of the rational or scientific.

Rodrigo Hernández closes the cycle with something that concerns the laws of physics but that escapes the human, as is the lack of gravity and the idea of floating in the universe. The condition of weightlessness occurs when a body that has a certain weight is counteracted by another gravitational forcé, or remains in free fall without feeling the effects of the atmosphere. It is a state in which physiological functions such as orientation, are slightly disturbed. The artist transforms the gallery into an infra-light space, through a series of new paintings based on the atmosphere conveyed in the novels of French writer Patrick Modiano, where his characters seem “so distant, so far from everything”.

The painting convention from which Rodrigo Hernández most clearly diverges in this series is that of “pictorial composition” as first appreciated by Leon Battista Alberti. In these paintings, perspective, which usually has the function of unifying the elements in a composition, is absent – or at least seems intermittent. On the other hand, the celestial space is represented with no resolution transforming the pictorial context into an indefinable one; it is impossible to know its depth or its dimension. The universe, according to this proposal, is the perfect scenario for an arbitrary pictorial arrangement that replaces compositional clarity with spatial imprecision.