The paintings on canvas, meanwhile, feature similar figures and poses, but using materials and procedures such as dyes, scratches, cut-outs and stitching.

The Barbizon School and the early French Impressionists had seen in the simple gestures of Japanese prints, especially those belonging to the Ukiyo-e genre, a pictorial method and a means of representation that would revolutionise the development of Western painting in the late 19th century. If the idea of painting ceased to be subject to plutocratic compulsion, it would display a variety of registers and subjects such as had never been imagined before. Influenced by what came to be known as Japonisme, some of these new pictorial techniques, linked to printmaking, gave impetus to new themes in modern painting.

In a way, Hernández now recovers the simplicity of the lines of the Japanese floating world. The immediacy and forcefulness of this graphic expression, the body language expressed in the figures, the intimacy of the scenes, and the strangeness of the poses depicted unveil a new pictorial atmosphere that concentrates the symbolic and the expressive.

Some of these new works are painted with connected and fluid strokes, while others employ intermittent patches and lines. At times the lines run smoothly, while at others they are marked with coarseness and repetition. The artist’s practice, in relation to these new themes he explores with his painting, is “discontinuous”: something slips and is interrupted.

It is said that that musician Sonny Rollins often uses rhythm as a foundational element, performing his whirlwind of broken and fractured improvisation in intervals over rhythmic rather than melodic patterns. Hernández transfers this to painting, with each figure, posture and colour, adjusted in this exhibition to narrow vertical formats, forming a thematic and compositional unity. Each moment in the course of the pictorial action, each section of a line drawing a body, is recorded in a few schematic strokes.

What is seen and not seen has been an essential aspect of Secundino Hernández’s painting over recent years, painting by accumulation and by absence. In both cases, the invisible has an undeniable presence.
Where previously constructed from what was removed, the paintings were “washed” or “emptied.” If the paintings were “cluttered”, what was left out of sight equally made up a fundamental part of the painting.

Now, whether visible or invisible, the process, with new techniques and subject matter, emerges as a pictorial trace or memory. The contorted figures, whether stitched, painted, screen-printed or printed on immense fields of colour, float as a resonance and echo of a trace that is at the origin and foundation of each piece.