Vicente Hernández
b. Batabanó, Havana, 1971. Resides in Cuba.
In the mid-1980s, the Facultad de Educación Artística (School of Art Education)—newly established in the old Columbia military camp, now Ciudad Libertad—became, together with the High Institute of Art and San Alejandro Academy, one of the most intensive sources of creativity in Cuban art for that decade. Facultad students—later dubbed, not without sarcasm, the “Columbia generation”—received an education marked by a close link between art theory and practice. This approach generated a creative explosion, encouraged by the non-hierarchical exchanges between instructors and students—Pedro Álvarez, Carmen Cabrera, José Angel Toirac, Elio Rodríguez, Tanya Angulo, Pedro Vizcaíno, Armando Mariño, Alexis Esquivel, the Mora brothers, Alfredo Manzo, Julio César Banasco, and Alejandro Mendoza—all with highly individual positions toward the ethical function of art, the deconstruction of style, and the island nation’s patriotic myths. It was in this cultural environment that Vicente Hernández graduated after absorbing the key ideas he would develop in his later work, which is well known in prestigious international art auctions but still ignored by the Cuban public.
Hernández is a sort of “Renaissance” artist, self-sufficient as an island amid the waves of post-conceptual trends in Cuba. He manifests a fierce loyalty to the craft of painting (and does it well), and to his own unhurried evolution around a repertoire of known themes, as well as a “strange” allegiance to a particular cultural and geographic space.
While many artists “internationalize” their works upon contact—albeit often superficial—with biennals and foreign art markets, Hernández’s body of work seems to bear the stamp of Hemingway’s adage: “every artist owes to the place he knows best to either destroy it or perpetuate it.” Born in Batabanó, a small coastal town southwest from Havana where he still lives, Hernández has devotedly made that geographic and sentimental space the focus of his works. His approach is not far removed from the way in which Gabriel García Márquez fictionalized his hometown of Aracataca, reincarnated as Macondo in his famous novel One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Hernández does not try to dazzle us with romantic or touristy visions of his hometown, which thrived in an era when its docks—now deserted—exported sugar and produce to the United States, England, and Spain. He gives visual expression to this microcosm in two different styles: through easy, expressionistic brushstrokes, or in a style closer to that of the great Flemish and Dutch masters. Hernández switches easily between both modes to portray the balloon-frame scenography of Batabanó, and the devastating impact of floods, hurricanes, and human indifference, in a meditation on desire and utopia, the breakdown of collective memory, and the boundless inventiveness of the Cuban people.
In this mission, his creativity dips into and melts together at high temperatures various icons of universal art: the tower of Babel painted by anonymous Flemish artists, and that of the Russian Tatlin; Piranesi and Monsiù Desiderio, chroniclers of ruin and terror; the velatura of Carlos Enríquez and Canaletto; Roman architecture; and Hindu cosmology. In exemplary irreverence, the artist defines himself both as borrower and cannibal with respect to the cultures that precede him.
The National Sport tackles, not without humor, one of the sportive passions in Cuba, without delving into the game itself or its peculiar history. (Having been imported from the United States, baseball was prohibited in 1868 by the Spanish governor and remained so until 1874.) Instead, Hernández focuses on the space where the game is usually played—the stadium, in this case not exactly a Major League one. This ballpark is the sports sanctuary of a forgotten, humble town—one that survives besieged by water, like a Coliseum transported to the waterways of Venice. Hernández, an architect of ruins, depicts in painstaking detail an edifice built on worn wooden houses and illuminated by grotesque, deformed towers. Behind home plate, on the front wall of a shed with ceremonial pretensions, shines the acronym of the optimistic sports logo created by the Revolution: L.P.V., Listos para Vencer (Ready to Win).
Opus Habana had its predecessor in a 2005 painting, Vuelo memorable sin rumbo (Memorable Aimless Flight), where Batabanó—streets, church, residents, and all—was portrayed while taking flight, swollen and transformed in a dirigible similar to the Hindenburg, navigating the stormy clouds. It is a metaphor for mobility, for flying without plan, because in Hernández’s images nothing stays grounded, everything seems ready to take off. In Opus…, the dirigible Batabanó drags along not only its docks and mills with smoking chimneys, but two long-gone landmarks of the town: the Dos Hermanos and Cervantes hotels, which perished due to the state’s neglect of its historic patrimony. Hernández proposes in his painting a unique rescue maneuver: the dirigible travels toward Old Havana (minutely depicted as it appears in a lithograph circa 1863), where intensive restoration efforts are taking place, in order to take refuge there and be saved from ruin. Seldom does a contemporary painter pay such celestial tribute to the place where he was born and where he abides.
—Abelardo G. Mena Chicuri
