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Called the “most Mexican of cities,” Guadalajara boasts tequila, charros and mariachis among its unique regional inheritances. Agave, the plant from which tequila is produced only grows in certain regions of Jalisco; any eager tourist can take the tequila train (literally) to Tequila for a tour of a 19th century tequila factory. Charros, a Mexican version of the American cowboy, still train in charrería, the unofficial national Mexican sport, which includes nine main skills, including lassoing bulls and horses and riding bulls. |
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A Playful Apocalypse in the “Most Mexican of Cities” – Monica Huerta
Called the “most Mexican of cities,” Guadalajara boasts tequila, charros and mariachis among its unique regional inheritances. Agave, the plant from which tequila is produced only grows in certain regions of Jalisco; any eager tourist can take the tequila train (literally) to Tequila for a tour of a 19th century tequila factory. Charros, a Mexican version of the American cowboy, still train in charrería, the unofficial national Mexican sport, which includes nine main skills, including lassoing bulls and horses and riding bulls. Mariachi bands, in fact, dress in the manner of charros: pointed boots, hardware-lined, fitted slacks—the hardware often in the shape of horse heads or horseshoes—a matching bolero-esque jacket and sombrero.
Unlike Mexico City, its larger counterpart, Guadalajara maintains the feel of a small town. Even the new Guggenheim Museum in Guadalajara will do little, I’m sure, to shake the thick traditions. Julia Chaplan’s recent article in the New York Times on the contemporary Mexican City art scene comments on the increasing trend towards what is not “fresa, which means bourgeois or yuppy.” Mexico City natives have a tendency to appropriate urbanity as their exclusive right, but tapatios see the absence of urban pretensions as the norm.
Sergio Hernandez, who also has a refreshing distaste for pretension and is one of the brightest spots in contemporary Mexican art, fittingly has a studio in Guadalajara that I recently visited. His effervescent manager, Noemí Mendoza, opened the front gate and led me into the large, open space, where Hernandez had some of his work displayed. El espacio, the space, she called it simply.
The first floor featured his larger canvases, oil on canvas with thickly sprinkled sand; the second floor was reserved for his equally impressive, though smaller, sketches. Mendoza pointed towards her favorite, a depiction of la virgén de Guadalupe, Our Lady of Guadalupe. “I don’t want him to sell it,” she said. And rightfully so; it’s an impressive piece. The virgén, ubiquitous in any Mexican city, graces Hernandez’s canvas in her usual pose: a cherub holding up her cloak at her feet, her hands folded in the most serene of prayers, the understanding, sympathetic gaze downward, toward an absent Juan Diego. But Hernandez decorates her dress with the visceral, fantastic creatures that crown his style.
Hernandez’s work first impressed me last summer in his native Oaxaca, where he also has an exhibition gallery, studio space and home. Unlike his densely packed canvases, the architecture of his house seems to frame and feature space rather than ornament it. Small rectangular gardens are scattered throughout the space, interrupting hallways, off bedroom; but there is no lush greenery in these gardens, only thin, single trees with sparse branches. While the recent past has brought much travel for Hernandez, his refuge is still the Oaxacan valley.
Sergio Hernandez was born in 1957 in Huajuapan de León, Oaxaca. He lived most of his childhood in Mexico City and at sixteen entered the Academia de San Carlos. He then enrolled at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Engraving "La Esmeralda,” of the National Institute of Fine Arts, where he studied from 1975-81. He counts as his most influential teachers, Gilberto Aceves Navarro, Roberto Parodi, Germán Venegas and Miguel Castro Leñero.
After a trip to Paris in 1986, where he began to experiment more seriously with the monochrome of his recent work, Hernandez returned to Oaxaca in 1987. In Oaxaca, he reencountered the Mexican artists Tamayo and Toldeo. He says during the same interview with Quién, that this confrontation with Mexican greats made him afraid of having lost a vernacular essential to his past, thus starving his work of potentially fruitful components. He says, “Para mí, regresar a Oaxaca fue muy importante, siento que me desintoxiqué de muchas cosas, (…) Juego con todo [For me, returning to Oaxaca was very important, it was a detoxification for me of many things. [Now] I play with everything.”
Hernandez commonly experiments with substances and techniques. He has used oils, ink, gouache, watercolor, encaustics; he has also used natural coloring pigments from his native soil, including cochineal. Apart from cloth and canvas, he has used rice paper, Indian amate paper and Egyptian papyrus. He claims to paint energies over forms and said in a 2005 interview, “Hoy en día la creación de mi trabajo se basa en las energías, es decir, ya no pinto formas, sino energías. Todo está muy relacionado con la magia y la alquimia, lo cual permite desconocer de dónde viene cada imagen que, al menor movimiento, ofrece otra lectura. [Today the creation of my work is based in energies, which is to say, I no longer paint forms, rather energies. Everything is related to magic and alchemy, which allows me to forget where each image comes from; with every movement, the image offers a new lesson.”
What immediately drew me towards his paintings was the peculiar combination of harsh and playful that he achieves through both the technique and kinds of representation. Hernandez scratches his strange figures into the composition often with a nail. For these “energies” turned form, he draws inspiration from a middle age text by the Beato de Liebana; the text treats the apocalypse according to Saint John. But, according to one Mexican critic, the “underworld becomes a dreamland Paradise when touched by the grace of the Oaxacan’s paintbrush.” And I can hardly disagree.
As if to imply the beginning inevitably mirrors the end, Hernandez’s La creación del mundo (The Creation of the World) uses the same exaggerated, skeletal insects as his paintings that more obviously imply his apocalyptic inspiration. In La creción del mundo, Hernandez succeeds in capturing both the exuberance and confusion of creation. Here one can clearly see his alchemistic and magical inspiration at play.
Nopanocheztli easily demonstrates the playful angle from which Hernandez’s work seems to originate, its apocalyptic undertones notwithstanding. Balancing a circular object on its trunk, its front leg also perched, the elephant at the center of the canvas is almost smiling.
The mystery of the piece entitled Enjambre, as in so many of Hernandez’s pieces, is in the frenetic movement. These could either be the twisting, torturous movements of the insects’ last breaths or the rhythmic churning of antennae in a massive conga line. This very confusion is, of course, Hernandez’s magic, in taking our senses and emotions to either extreme at once: destruction and celebration, exaltation and death.
Hernandez’s reputation as an innovator continues. In 2005, Tane, the Mexican jewelry company, chose Hernandez to design a complete line of silver sculptures. Of working with silver, Hernandez says, "este metal tiene un sentido religioso por la vida que adquiere a través de las manos de los artesanos [this metal has a religious sense because of the life that it acquries in traveling through artisans’ hands].” Given complete creative freedom, Hernandez used the opportunity to experiment with sculpture and continues to expand his versatility.
