El Camino

Horanggasy Artpolygon

Gwangju, South korea

April 8–18

El Camino, the first solo exhibition by the artist Albano Hernández (Spain, 1988) in South Korea, unfolds on a methodological approach in which the final work is not merely a tangible aftermath, but the accumulated sequence of experiences of the journey itself. The central axis of the exhibition is a video documenting The Shadow at Gwangjucheon, a stream of the Yeongsan River that serves as a site of transit and outdoor activity for the inhabitants of Gwangju.

Hosting one video and nine paintings, the exhibition aims to raise a profound reflection on the journey as an approach to existence, creation, and knowledge. The 17-minute video, far from serving as a purely documentary record, reveals a methodology grounded in walking as a means of reflection. The discovery of the tree is not an aleatory result, yet a process of drifting and perceptual refinement. The selected shadow encapsulates multiple variables, from interactions with citizens to the inclination of light and the ecosystem of the grass onto which it is projected. To determine which shadow to paint during his residency in Horanggasy, the artist explores the city for days, moving through streets, trails, and riversides. This wandering around was not incidental, but a deliberate catalyst of his practice within the tradition of the flâneur: the observer who transforms the urban experience into aesthetic material through the act of walking. In El Camino, walking thus becomes a performative act, a strategy of openness to the unforeseen, an invisible drawing that precedes the site-specific installation.

The video documenting The Shadow at Gwangjucheon is projected alongside three sketches and six paintings. The paintings belong to the Traces series, where materiality becomes the primary property of the work. Here, the purity of white coexists with discarded materials, such as plastics, acrylics, aluminum, foams, and glass, which are dispersed across the surface not covered by the shadow, whose silhouette appears in a kind of dematerialization that expands the search for a totally sustainable work.

Ultimately, El Camino invites a reflection on time and sustainability in the artistic practice. The Shadow is not an object, but an event; an ephemeral and sustainable presence that exists only in relation to light, time, and perception. As the art critic Tomás Paredes points out, “Albano’s Shadow is a trace of the real that cannot be entirely fixed, and it is precisely in that impossibility where its poetic power resides.” In this exhibition, the viewer is prompted not only to observe the artworks, but to retrace the journey that made them possible, because on that path is where the true moments reside and art happens.