The Eternal in Francisco Hernández

The necessary intuition of the creator as well as his sensitivity are the real working tools that allow us to glimpse the inner being of the artist. It is these attributes that direct and contemplate reality through the senses. But it is not so much a tangible reality as one that is transcended.

In F. Hernández, this intuition helped him to take root in himself, challenging and questioning, time and again, not the social nucleus that was to understand him but his own creative spirit; that is, his search for the beautiful as a concept:

I fundamentally pursue Beauty, that mysterious, indefinable magnet that exists, is there and coexists with us. As an Andalusian, I notice and feel the need to represent the timeless elements. The man, the plant, the cloud, the sky, etc. A cosmic feeling outside of time. The voice of these bodies educated my childhood and has influenced me to redeem my beings and recreate them far from the anguished violence of cement, steel, automatism and the density of the big cities. All this material of nature, beings and spaces I care for like a classic, with a Hellenic base in terms of order and balance. In my work, geometry also runs through its corners and framework, with a monumental will, seeking a dialogue between forms and geometry, finally leaving an orifice through which the inappreciable – the tremor – the unknown – can flow ¹Literally transcribed from the artist’s original document that later served for the publication of the book Francisco Hernández, by Manuel Ríos Ruiz, and published by the General Directorate of Artistic and Cultural Heritage in 1977. Madrid.

This, he enquired about himself as a need that led him to a profound knowledge of the history of art, as well as its technical study, both of the past and of the present, for it is immutable eternity as Baudelaire said, carrying it out in a self-taught and restless way, since what he had learned was never enough.

Thus, his work was built on the firm classical base, meticulously absorbed at a very early age, to give free rein to creative freedom which, at times, dived into magical expressionism; at others, into Andalusian baroque allegory; at others, in the Hellenistic Mediterranean, with a tight brushstroke subjected to drawing; or else, in a graphic style in which he disdained volume to the detriment of the rhythm of line and colour, where only the pure essence of the idea was of value.

It might seem that the different styles that can be found in his work are the result of a casual inspiration. This would be a mistake, because the hand directed by the artist that beat within him deposited the same virtues on the most accessible languages, or on the most hermetic, but always apprehensible in their essence and with the necessary continuity in their evolutionary context.

Therefore, observing a painting from the middle of the 20th century, with its inherent style and technique, will give the same results as one made in the first decade of the 21st century, because, even understanding the differences that lie between the years that have passed, with all the complexities that creation over time always entails, that common thread persists and is what unites them in a structural evidence that has developed since their childhood and that is, without a doubt, mastery in drawing.

This, it can be said, is the order that does not mask but rather exalts and makes transparent all his production, as it endows it with an unquestionable solidity.

Thus, it warns us that to delve into his work is also to delve into his thought and vital essence, because for him, life was art and art was life, a fact that cannot be separated and which we can often overlook and look at superficially, focusing on the anecdotal aspects of the container and not on the true nature of the content.

Because it evokes the transcript of the spirit and unfolds on the canvas to express and recreate time and space, matter and form; but also, sleep and wakefulness, light and darkness, in short, the condition of being and non-being since, at some point, the internal oscillations also flourish and flare up and may seem contradictory without being so.

However, that personal vibration continues to coexist, that imprint that qualitatively identifies the work and its author as the result of the imperishable beat of existence. For this reason, the twists and turns that we find in his work lead, not to different plastic aesthetics that were presumed to be in use, but rather to the analysis of his own inner conscience together with the observation of his surroundings.

He nourished himself and as a result of that digestion, new models of coexistence appeared in his work that marked different routes of expression but always directed towards the same destination, a pictorial universe that transcended reality and that always took him to a beyond in search of beauty from his internal visualisation.

This is undeniable because the creative capacity surpassed himself, in a certain sense he was not its master, and it procured for him the incessant obligation to continue; a non-stop that could border on dissatisfaction, not frustrated, but in the challenge of knowing that this was his life and conformism would have meant the death of his inner being and, therefore, the death of the artist.

And it was not like that. His creative intuition eternalised him through the gazes of the spectator who contemplates and will contemplate his work; his transcended reality, in short, his sense of the beauty of the moment in which he lived.