THE ARMORY SHOW, 2024
Orestes Hernández - Nacho Martín Silva
September 6 - 8, 2024
Booth: P29 ( Presents Section)


Exploring the surrealist visions of artists Orestes Hernández and Nacho Martín Silva is an open door to the complex universe of the contemporary Image. These two painters, playful par excellence, are great critics of the language and history of painting, as well as the semantic politics associated with it. Our presentation at The Armory Show draws attention to a fun and fresh selection of large format paintings and sculptures, recent work by these artists.


I have come here to witness the inquiry, 2024
Assembled and polychrome wood sculpture
89.5 x 40 x 73 cm (35.2 x 15.7 x 3.1 in)
Much of Orestes Hernández's work emerges from a kind of childlike aesthetic - playful and perverse - that turns the process of demystifying art into a gesture of tremendous radicalism. His most recent sculptures reflect a deceptive reality that summons irony and frankness at the same time. His characters refer to the universes of comics and bad painting, hence the bewilderment they generate in the viewer.
the viewer, who wonders whether what the artist presents is a hallucinatory toy or a twisted sculptural object.

Strange Paradise 7, 2024
Oil on linen
196 x 220 (77.2 x 86.6 in)
Martín Silva's painting could be described as a carriage and reconsideration. Hauling, not only because the artist might take pre-established images, but because his studio seems to become a sort of warehouse or storage room, where images and works of art -or attempts at them- accumulate, and where perhaps, years later, they might find meaning where they had none when there, rejected for their lack of relevance and opportunity. The studio becomes a cellar; these materials see time pass and the artist returns to them, to the barrel to decant and recover them. This also means that the studio is a kind of cartographic archive; in the midst of all the disorder, in the process of searching, or an almost disinterested drift disinterested by everything that accumulates there, the artist comes across disclaimers or feints that over time or by the circumstances of each project, can turn them into valid and relevant materials: they are like flashbacks, a return to the past through these remains that show him how newly opened solutions and newly trodden paths (...)".
Juan Francisco Rueda.