The Heinrich Ehrhardt Gallery is presenting a new exhibition of works by Secundino Hernández (Madrid, 1975).

Over recent years, Hernández’s painting has developed under formulas of analysis and synthesis. If in a formal sense his painting formerly revolved around a series of common elements, his latest exhibitions have shown a pictorial approach in which geometry, floating forms, conceptual rigour and analytical composition have emerged as central elements of his work.

Thus, from the gestural to the synthetic, the path was opened for a line in which thinking about painting becomes the main axis of his research. Thinking about painting forces us to paint in a different way and that is the path on which Hernandez finds himself. While perhaps the referents are the same and the themes are similar, his approach to them is now radical and direct.

Emphasising all these formulations of his current painting, this exhibition confronts the viewer with a fertile dichotomy, the very thing that usually occurs in the painter’s studio: on the one hand a series of almost monochrome paintings through which the painter composes a geometric structure based on the construction of strips of linen sewn together, sometimes in white on linen and at other times with dark tones converting the surface of the canvas into an extraordinary blue velvet. This first linear form is a starting point for confronting the painting with new pictorial techniques that often consist of removing paint in order to shape the work. On the other hand and in contrast with this synthetic line of his painting, we find a material aspect arising from a conceptual analysis of painting itself. Some years ago Hernández began to produce what he called palettes, a series of works in which paint is added instead of removed, with layers and layers of the pictorial materials most commonly used in his workshop building up in volcanic reliefs of colour.