Surrealism takes on a whole new meaning once you lay eyes on Diango Hernández’s handmade repertoire. The Cuban artist’s work has been famously capturing eyeballs, imaginations and eventually walls for decades now. A niche name from a more so niche interest, the bourgeoning conversation around AI being able to create art has brought the artist’s work to the more catalogued mainstreams. As an art novice, you may not ‘get’ his work. But the inability to peel your eyes away from it is something that is guaranteed. And once the realisation sets in that every stroke you see on the canvas through the screen had a live hand and even livelier vision behind it, the magnanimity of his talent begins to truly settle in to your psyche.
Finding His Way
Born in 1970 to a teacher and an engineer in Sancti Spiritus, Cuba, Hernández’s artistic bent was a childhood gift. After his stint at a countryside boarding school, he went on to study at the Havana Superior Institure of Design (ISDI) from 1989 to 1994, which is where he received his degree in industrial design. He then curated the Ernesto Oroza – the group responsible for sculptural installations incorporating various research methodologies to address social and cultural issues in Cuba. After it disbanded in 2003, Hernández left Cuba for Europe which is where he branched out as his own brand and person.
His first solo show took place in Cologne’s Frehrking Wiesehofer. Called ‘Amateur’ it consisted over 2,000 drawings he had made during his Cuba years – an endless artistic meditation of sorts playing on the themes of fragility and incompleteness. Incidentally, these themes define much of his work in the following years as well, medium no bar.
The Process
The intersection of culture and politics has played a huge role in the context of everything he has created. Space and shape are central to most of his canvas works – the colours don’t bleed into each other, each stroke holding its own; but the skillful blurring of lines both in palette and context is exactly what makes a viewing of a Hernández original feel otherworldly, and meditative.
Venice-based Art Critic and independent curator Daniele Capra is perhaps best positioned to explain the fluid complexity of Hernández’s work: “(The) artist takes the programmatic freedom to digress, not to choose the shortest path, but to move in the surroundings, dilating the path with different strategies. It is a dynamic that leads to a perceptive slowing down of the spectator, who finds himself in a condition similar to the one who is looking at a text that continuously oscillates, as unstable as the continuous flow of the waves.”
AI Could Never…
Well, maybe it could. The coded ‘consciousness’ of AI rests on an endless reserve of information, further refined by the endless prompts it receives hour in and hour out. But anything AI would ever regurgitate would have always drawn influence from something that was first human. It’s a sad state of affairs that the originality of human thought and vision is what is inadvertently contributing to its demise. But that is all the more reason to support work and output that continues to feel original – something that didn’t take under 10 seconds to ‘create’ but is instead informed by years and decades worth of dedication and commitment – when a vision slowly realised, stroke by stroke, was the ‘prompt’. Coming back to Hernández in particular, he is among those many artists that turn you into an audience, even if that’s not what you set out to be.