LUIS ALBERTO HERNANDEZ

 

Luis Alberto Hernandez was born in Puerto la Cruz, Venezuela in 1950. He completed his bachelor studies first in Fine Arts and later in Literature at the Central University of Venezuela.

He is represented in museums and in important private and public collections in Venezuela and internationally. He has shown his artworks in England, Spain, France, Italy, United States of America, and United Arab Emirates as well as many other Latin American countries.

For more than ten years Luis Alberto Hernandez has been a university professor in Art History, Drawing, Aesthetics and the Language of Fine Arts at the University for the Fine Arts Armando Reveron and at the Cristobal Rojas School for the Arts in Caracas, Venezuela.

 

 

ABOUT HIS WORK

 

Luis Alberto Hernández describes his work as spiritual - as virtually sacred art. Indeed he borrows from traditional as well as nontraditional religious symbols. The images tend to remind one at first glance of icon painting with their gold leaf and rich glazes, but these are not religious art objects in the traditional sense.

Hernández borrows liberally from classical models of religious painting both in style as well as content. While it is dangerous to apply a literal interpretation to the titles of his works, they do offer clues to his meaning. Two of the recurrent themes are written language and silence. Hernández believes that written characters carry a magical significance. One entire series of works is simply called “Characters”. Two exhibits in Germany were called “Characters of Silence”. Pre-occupied with the role of organized religion, the images reflect Hernández’s personal evolution, his own struggle and inner doubts. Modern Man’s struggle between chaos and reason is depicted in the canvases of Luis Alberto Hernández.

Two graphic series treat the theme in different ways. One series consists of small format simple images mostly black on gold. The other comprises large format works with painted ornamental frames.

The first images, most done in black and gold are painted in broad layers and tend to have a static effect. In all these images attention is directed towards a central form – always rendered in black with meandering patterns on their surface, all of which is surrounded by an area of gold. The border repeats the black of the central figure. The works of the large-scale series are richly colored with deeply layered surfaces. In contrast their central figures are geometric in form, circles or triangles, stationary in feeling, rendered in black with dynamic oscillations in color in the area surrounding the center. The eye is led outwards into the chiaroscuro of the border.

His art works intend to establish alliances between our earthly limitations and the infinite. His art presents images that acquire symbolic dimensions which allude to the sacred, yearning for eternity in a quest inseparable from the human conscience.

Luis Alberto Hernandez started his work in the last decades of a twentieth century marked by the development of science and technology, mass media, cybernetics and the sophistication of space voyages. Nevertheless the sacred, resolved in magical-religious contents, would be his main source of inspiration as the axis of universal human feeling and of a cosmogony essentially common to all human beings and civilizations. Like a question mark his work moves away from the techno-scientific paraphernalia of the twentieth century and, worried by the contemporary crisis of spiritual values, delves into “the great themes that have concerned man throughout history: the problem of death, transcendence, the mysteries of existence, the idea of God or the notion of Spirit”¹

The artist asks the viewer to allow these silent symbols of meaning to reveal themselves in this context of the struggle between order and chaos. Luis Alberto Hernández asks us to reflect on this very real battle and this necessity for the constant reconfirmation of order – and ultimately to regain our certainty of higher powers at work in our lives.