“Perception does not know the concept of infinity; from the very outset it is confined within certain spatial limits imposed by our faculty of perception.”

–Albrecht Dürer in response to his contemporary Leon Battista Alberti’s treatise Della Pictura (On Painting), 1435

     Although lived experience serves as the wellspring for his paintings, Erick Alejandro Hernández’s night is a narrow edge eschews meaning through the gradual addition of material that allows opposing forces of loss and tenderness / presence and absence to exist together in finite visual moments. Like the imminent exhale of a long-held breath, Hernández’s compositions are simultaneously imbued with and informed by a sense of place inextricable from loss.

     Compositional strategies galvanized from Titian to de Chirico and others in between enable Hernández to effectively release each one of his images from boundaries of the stretched canvas, where they can exist in perpetual states of flux. Figures in various states of transit: severed, floating, or ringed with subtle halos stem from fragments of various histories of loss and displacement that eventually coalesce on the canvas, mirroring the artist’s own experiences with immigration at a young age.

    Working iteratively and associatively to fuse form with content, Hernández places a preeminence on unflinching honest in his work, even while intuiting that an authentic portrayal of the external world is impossible to express in a two dimensional space. The vicissitudes and texture of memories are full of contradictions: both within reach, yet not present; in sight but out of recognition. Thus, Hernández’s paintings are most faithfully representations of psychic realities, not only the artists’ own but also his interpolations of intersubjective space: shared mindsets like scarcity, destabilization, resilience, and assimilation.

     Language, spoken and heard is subtly interlaced throughout this exhibition. The phrase “night is a narrow edge” comes from a poem written by Hernández’s late father. A small idiosyncratic object at the focal center will be rendered minutely, in high detail, serving a function akin to a memento mori (Latin for “remember that you [have to] die”): a reminder of something that he intrinsically already knows. The parentheses in the bilingual titles’ of the paintings also compel an embrace of words in two languages, each shading the other with nuanced specificity.

     As viewer, you are invited to decode Hernández’s highly crafted visual lexicon.