Up and Coming: Visionary Dealer Victoria Miro Unveils a Solo Exhibition by a Spanish Painter on the Rise. By Molly Gottschalk.
Visionary British art dealer Victoria Miro is known for spotting artists early in their careers—Chantal Joffe, Peter Doig, and Tal R among them—and a young Spanish painter, Secundino Hernández, has not escaped her prescient eye. By now, Miro is synonymous with sold out works and long waitlists; paintings by Hernández, the newest addition to her roster, are no exception. Just prior to Art Basel, where one of the artist’s works sold within the first 15 minutes of the preview, Miro unveiled a solo exhibition of his paintings at her London space—a show entirely sold out before the doors even opened. Described as “wash” paintings, the works are somewhere between figuration and abstraction; a product of scraping, craving, and literally spraying the canvas with a pressure washer. And as there is perhaps no better milieu to observe the up-and-coming painter than his Madrid studio, blocks from the neighborhood where he grew up and surrounded by the energetic, layered canvases that first caught Miro’s attention, it is there that we arranged an hour to chat.
“The studio is always alive,” he said, confessing to working on multiple canvases at once—each painting linked to the next. “I include the whole process on the canvas; I mix the color on one, and then I take it to another.” The process is sometimes meticulous, sometimes spontaneous, but most often it is a combination of the two extremes, a harmony Hernández discovered two years ago after attempting to destroy a painting—gone rogue—with a pressure washer. Today, paintings like those hanging at Victoria Miro employ a process of precise, carefully planned addition and uncontrolled subtraction. “With this machine, I am carving, digging, taking off paint. When you remove the painting, there are restos—little traces of what was happening before. You can see the surface of the textile; the raw, pure canvas. You go directly to the soul of the painting.”...
