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Albano Hernández

Artist | Albano Hernandez Dominguez | Vacuum packed painting

Statement

Perception, value and productivity constitute the central axis of my practice. I explore and challenge the potential of painting from a perspective influenced by disciplines as seemingly disparate as the politics of art production, the meat industry, or asceticism. I focus on how commodification modifies the perception of matter.

Growing up in Ávila, a region of Spain where meat consumption is part of the culture, and where the meat industry comprises a significant weight in the region's economy, has led me to focus on the aesthetics that meat generates as a commodity. I have obsessive thoughts with the processes of fragmentation, packing, distribution and exposure of animal bodies under the meat label, with a special focus on processed meat and the simulacrum of fake meat. The manipulation and perception of materiality interests me more than in its production.

“[...]Production, after all, is the excretory phase in a process of appropriation.”
Seth Price, Dispersion, 2007

Emanating from pictorial thoughts and based mainly on ceramic works, my practice has a transcategorical condition. My day-to-day is a constant game of dichotomies where a labour- intensive practice is mixed with industrial processes, undoing is as important as making, and impurity is as substantial as purity. In these processes, I follow a circular economy policy that allows me to reduce the amount of waste generated, establish dialogues between different works, and generate a more elastic and sustainable practice.

Fragments of a brushstroke make up my latest paintings. The first step of this process is to create a brushstroke with air-dry clay. Once the brushstroke is almost dried, I use an electric food slicer for fragmenting it mechanically into slices which are displayed in the natural reading order for western cultures, from left to right, top to bottom. Finally, some of these works are later vacuum packed. The resulting object generates an image that perhaps leads the viewer to question what it means to paint a painting, or how matter is presented in the contemporary world, or the perception of ordinary consumption, or a different way of seeing, anything or not at all.




Work

  • 2021 - RCA
  • Drawings
  • Prints
  • Books
  • Past Work

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