Cromocracy

“Herrero’s apologue can induce a sort of paralysis of volition: the artist, with the laconic severity that has always distinguished him, seems to tell us that no space of freedom is conceivable today. Yet a detail, only seemingly naturalistic, tells us perhaps something different. The coloured sandbags that he has added to the ensemble, in fact, are a sign of resistance: a resistance entrusted to the same colour which, in the adjacent room, saturates us with its noise. Where there is danger, always, what gives salvation also grows”. Andrea Cortellessa

In this exhibition the artist reflects on the crucial features of actuality. The recent conflict at Europe’s door, the past re-emerging, through a threatening rhetoric we thought buried forever, the relationship between history, the individual and political power are brought to question through a pictorial cycle and a site specific installation. Herrero’s painting research explores a liminal space between the figurative and the non figurative, where the color element often reaches the height of a conceptual content of the work, where the individual, the natural environment and history become categories on which the artist does ponder, by offering his personal interpretation, through venues like the portrait, the setting or the landscape. His painting technique based on subtraction, and the strong chromatic presence given by the use of pure colors, create an essential and luminous painting. Herrero has said that he follows Mayakovsky’s idea of economy in art, as a fundamental aesthetics and an “antidote against nausea and excess.” In recent years the artist has been paying close attention to the concept of the Observatory and the human-natural context relationship, a research which has brought about his works focusing on the notion of Saturation.

The exhibition is introduced by an essay by Andrea Cortellessa, historian and critic of literature, and will be ac-companied by a catalogue published by the Magonza publishing house.

In the exhibition the artist has worked on the two rooms of the gallery to initiate a binary conversation between two contrasting subjects. In both rooms the paintings are set against everyday items, objects, clothes, all reminiscent of an idea of home.

As is his custom, in his large canvases Herrero returns to the concept of saturation through the use of pure colours. Images emerge through a process by which the painting matter is subtracted; by playing with the white of the canvas background, the nuances shaping the images are created, similarly to what is done with photographic print.

In the main space of the gallery, with the large cycle of five standing canvases leaning on the walls, the artist has conceived a conversation between figuration and abstraction. The saturated canvases, with a strong chromatic impact, show a gestural intertwining recalling the weave of fabrics or tapestries, but also the scrolling down of the busy network of numerical codes and cryptographic symbols of the digital language, openly evoking the cyber symbology of Julian Assange’s desaturated face.

Facing the large painting cycle, we come across a room furnished like a bedroom, in disarray, as if left in a hasty flight by its dwellers. On the wall above the bed there is a landscape, a large magenta saturated canvas reproducing an atomic mushroom cloud. The image comes from a frame of the material filmed by the US army during the first of a sequence of nuclear tests, known as the Operation Crossroads, which started in 1946 in the waters around the atoll of Bikini, in the Marshall Islands, a nature heaven in the Pacific turned into a nuclear testing ground, with 67 nuclear tests in 12 years.

Hanging in the whiteness of the partition wall between the two main rooms, like a prying eye, a small Venetian-made convex mirror envelops and distorts us together with the space surrounding us.

«… this is a comparison between the personal situation of a single individual and that of an integrated family. On the one hand, Assange, a face that in our imagination belongs to the future, to a utopian digital and technological progress, but living for years anchored to an obsolete, vengeful and punitive rationale, typical of our culture; on the other hand, an ordinary home in any European city, a home (something that Assange hasn’t had for many years) that suddenly finds itself in disarray, upset, disrupted. As tradition dictates, as a decoration for the room, over the bed hangs a landscape; this is not a pastoral scene but an image taking us back to the years of terror from the last century.

Unlike the flat, two-dimensional, abstract and rarefied space housing the saturation and Assange’s portrait, the bedroom represents an analogic, physical, three-dimensional and material space, laden with the violence of the present time that we thought well behind us. At the windows of the bedroom and the entire gallery, as if defending art – now the only possible form of rebellion – colourful bags form a chrome-trench. Cromocracy is a reflection on the present, on the fact that both the future we picture and the past we know are both fragile categories which can be distorted and manipulated by the present».

Cromocracy – Abel Herrero
by Andrea Cortellessa