artnexus #83

Diango Hernández (Cuba, 1970) carries with him a complex cultural baggage. On the one hand, his Cuban origins and the Caribbean experience of his beginnings; on the other, a life in Europe that connects him to global capitalism. After graduating from the Instituto Superior de Diseño Industrial (ISDI), in Havana, he was a co-founder of the “Ordo Amoris Cabinet” group, and remained active as a member until 2003. Later he relocated to the city of Düsseldorf, in Germany, where he now lives and works. The complex grid interwoven by Hernández’ visual discourse explores and critiques topics such as communication and incommunication, the manipulation of memory, the weighty messages with which we are constantly bombarded. Poetically, he introduces us into a space where the most diverse objects interact—drawing, sculpture, painting—to grant us access to a world where stories are told, where new relationships coexist, anonymous references salvaged from oblivion. The complexity of thoughts that emerge from diverse cultural models creates new ways of perceiving and representing. Freed from nostalgia, Hernández’s works nevertheless contain self-referential elements. As the artist puts it, “I frequently speak of memory as an enormous closet with many drawers that constantly change in order and size. There is a point when the closet disappears and memories dissolve into each moment, into each day. I have reached that point; I have completed that journey, and I have arrived but, honestly, I have no idea where it is that I have arrived.”
IVONNE PINI