For this event, the artist will display in the historic premises of the former historic art foundry – Ex Fonderia d’arte Luigi Tommasi – presenting a pictorial installation made up of two works in dialogue with each other, one of monumental dimensions, whereas the project room in Via Garibaldi is given over to smaller works on canvas. The implicit tragic quality associated with the natural elements revokes echoes of a distant past alluding to the spirit of Romanticism, whereas the reflection speaks to us of a present that is anything but romantic. Through a play of thematic and chromatic references, Herrero presents his personal reflection on the classical elements of landscape painting, taking up recurrent arguments of its iconography. In this specific case, the artist leads us to reflect on a shipwreck, a tragic scenario in which a gash of light opens within a huge vortex of black sea, a possibility of salvation entrusted to green, to hope, that arrives here from a celestial phenomenon: a green eclipse. Thus, it is a cosmic, sensorial, luminous phenomenon that opens a possible colourway towards salvation. As the artist himself puts it, ‘A black sea, a shipwreck that – as in a great tragic and pathetic symphony – contains a green interval, of a saturated and dazzling green, the reflection of a remote cosmic luminescence. A shipwreck by greenlight.’
Herrero attributes to the colour element an importance that goes beyond mere representation. This is why in his painting the artist reflects on the concept of saturation, a condition that he believes permeates our contemporary world. In his pictorial practice he employs pure colour, generally choosing the colours used in printing: magenta, cyan, green, yellow and black. This sets off a painting that is powerful and luminous, in which the very subject becomes pure colour and the distinction between chromatic and thematic quality is erased: the subject becomes colour and the colour becomes subject.