Nelson Hernández

Lives and works in London, UK

Artist statement

I am a Chilean painter born in Patagonia and based in London. Growing up in one of the world’s most remote geographies and working today in one of the capitals of global art is not a biographical detail: it is the foundation of my work. That transit allowed me to experience at first hand how the specific and the local dissolve within a globalised culture, and that erosion of identity is the central problem of my painting. I work with oil and acrylic on canvas and wooden panel. Through photogrammetry and 3D modelling I capture precise cultural fragments: museum sculptures and artefacts that embody the “universal” European canon, and toys and pop culture objects that now operate as the contemporary equivalent of the same mechanism. I assemble these digitised fragments into fractured scenes that I resolve in painting, where the image finds its final form. The result is dreamlike, unstable compositions that are nonetheless meticulously constructed: defocused surfaces, blurred edges, objects of radically different cultural origins held at the same intensity within a single plane. I move freely between pictorial registers (photographic, gestural, cartoonish) according to what each work demands, in affinity with Gerhard Richter’s pictorial freedom. The references never quite settle: they oscillate between recognition and uncertainty, like images that have been copied, circulated and degraded over time. I am interested in soft power as a continuous mechanism. Where religion and...

Artwork