Something surprising happens with the work of Orestes Hernández: after a few years of thinking about it, we think we know it, understand it, calibrate it, but the truth is that we know nothing. It is a deficiency that is not necessarily ours, but of what we could call “failure of origin”. When I speak of failure, understand, I am referring to traps, to deliberate cognitive and semantic mismatches. Because that is what Orestes is most interested in: going back to the way things work (our perception of things) and insisting on it. Stretching it, twisting it, pushing it to the limit until the bone of artifice manifests itself in its rabid materiality. And then to go away and leave us in no man's land, wondering who are all those impossible beings with whom he abandoned us. Of those characters, of course, we know nothing either, except that they speak his own language and disdain categories as precious to art as representation, metaphor, coherence. In that reality without discursive handles to use, “the secret” of a winged beast is nothing more than that: a secret. And how could we get to know what is, by nature, unknowable?

In this exhibition we have to deal once again with the trial and error, applying a methodology of improvisation when approaching his paintings and sculptures. The pieces gathered here, which trace an arc of a little more than ten years in his work, allow us to skip chronological formalities, stages, and circumstantial analysis and enter into the body to body with these creatures that Orestes does not stop producing. It is a good opportunity to continue turning the inexhaustible nut of illusion and uneasiness. “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

Daleysi Moya