Time is the fire in which we burn, 2026

In this series, the artist chooses slumbering creatures – bats, monkeys, bears – as his subjects. Painted on wood, these creatures appear soft and fuzzy through painstakingly delicate brush strokes, but their silent rest offers no further details to interpret what they’re experiencing while they sleep.

This position of the viewer vis-à-vis a painting, Hernández suggests, is a replay of other occurrences related to both the world of dreams and that of animals; in all of them, the most important feature being phenomenal experiences such as sensing, feeling, and perceiving (in contrast with rationality or representational consciousness). In essence, dreaming is radically subjective and untransferable, perhaps wholly inaccessible to others. This unconditional mine-ness, this inner life of a dream, of a painting, and of an animal is what keeps us guessing and what makes the viewer not only an observer but an active “imaginator”.

The title, Time is the fire in which we burn, is a quote by Delmore Schwartz.