This Is How It Is 

By Daleysi Moya 

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If there is a constant feature across all the critical exercises constituted by the work of Orestes  Hernández (Holguín, 1981), it isthe artist’s inability to confine his creative process to one or more legible labels. Exegesis is based, of course, on the principle of interpretation, which more or less  points toward the need to settle on an ultimate meaning that would anchor a multifaceted work  of art. Fortunately, with Hernández such an approach is condemned to failure. This is due first to  his poetics of instability, a system that leans toward dissonance and knocking familiar logics out  of joint. Secondly, as he himself has recognized over time, it is due to his deliberate renunciation  of metaphorization, in the conventional sense of the correspondence “A is B.” Metaphor can  become a sort of shroud for an artist, swaddling the corpse of the living dead. For Hernández,  one could say, A is B and C and D and Z. There are few creators out there like him, who would turn  their backs on the semantic imperative. 

We might be able to stay outside the margin of error if we acknowledge that his work  demands other approaches, and that in order to hit bone and not go away emptyhanded we have  to let ourselves be pulled along by his centrifugal dynamics. In this case, to read is to forget how  much we take for granted, and to assume that for Hernández things do not refer, but rather “are,” in the same way that cold, hard reality tends to be the best source of analogies and  misunderstandings. From these coordinates, we come to understand what mattersfor Hernández  and for the present exhibition: This Is How It Is is situated in the operations—or “counter 

operations," as he would have it—developed here, interventions that do not act on unique  physical objects (a painting, a sculpture, a video) but rather on the language that generates them  and the ways it brings modern rationality to crisis, or how we think what we think. 

This Is How It Is consists of pieces that communicate with each other and that participate  collectively in their creator’s uneven, disconnected universe. We find painting, sculpture, video,  and expressions that ultimately end up orbiting around the conceptual, demonstrating that both  the usual genres and the more recent ones are still “mental things.” Hernández has noted that  the animations and sculptural objects in this series constitute a sort of extension of his paintings from the late 2000s, in that they feature similar beings, settings, mythologies, and ways of  existing. Nevertheless, the line of continuity in this project is different, more powerful, which has  to do with creating gaps and breaking down the door through which we gain entry into a work of  art, breaking the barrier between reality and representation, and coming to grips with the fact that sometimes the game is played in reverse. Mario Montalbetti would say that “the poem  produces thought without knowledge.” This idea wonderfully suits the work of Orestes  Hernández because his pieces are indeed there to lead us to the terrain of “non-sense,” where  things are still open questions.

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