Ernesto Manili


We could say, no doubt about it, that Nancy Hernández found the reason for her painting at the very heart of Nature. From the bottom of the sea (which she explored many times) to the top of the mountain she can watch today from her home, her eye knew how to capture animal life moved by the magnificent landscape she uses as a background to magically surround her creatures.
Her works are ruled by light and color. The intensified and vibrant color penetrates the spectator with an overwhelming force, making him or her rediscover that beauty within everyone’s reach that often times is not seen.
All of this is a result of her patient observation and a kind of sensitivity enriched by knowledge and constant work.
Nothing was given for free to this painter; the importance her work has attained today, comes from many years of study and sustained effort, performed with profound faith.
There is no drama in Nancy’s painting, which doesn’t mean her life transpired with no difficulties, just as anyone else’s. However, the true artist doesn’t transfer her own pain directly to the art she creates (Utrillo is a good example of this). On the contrary, she sublimates this pain, turning it into a poetic work of art, as it is the case with Nancy.
The imagination that runs through her paintings is worth a separate chapter. Even though imagination is something that can be developed, let’s agree that it is more than anything a divine attribute; you are either born with it or without it. It is a privilege of some chosen individuals, but what really matters is that they know how to use this imagination at the service of a vocation.  That, like in the case of this Argentinean artist -who is a high exponent of the art of painting of our times- it is used to delight those fortunate enough to own one of her works.

 

Charitto Chavez

It is our obligation to express our critical view, since criticism is the best inducement for improvement, as long as it is made in a constructive manner, without ever intending to hurt, even in the case of a negative criticism. How wonderful it is to feel proud of a fellow painter!
It was about a year ago that there was an exhibition in one of the cubicles at the Seaport Market Place. It was a large exhibition for such a tiny space. However, I call it large not because of the amount of works, but because of how powerful they were. I was later invited to the opening, where I expressed my viewpoint to the artist. She caused a great impact on me, since she is a sweet-mannered, humble Argentinean woman with a heart as big as her work.
This artist’s work is truly impressive, solid, and mature. I say impressive because it causes as much impact on the layman as on the expert.
Mature because her work is a melodic breakdown of color, coordinating colors with such a valent color that it reminds us of the concerts of our classics in one of their musical highs. In spite of being a colorist of character, Nancy not only plays with such ranges, but she also breaks them down into basic forms, obtaining drawings with very basic characteristics, dancing in a whirl of well coordinated themes.
I said her work is solid because it contains a strength and grip on the tracing that are admirable, to the point that, observing it from the typical perspective of our traditions, the work does not seem created by a woman. Tradition makes us think of women as fully delicate creatures.
 We can observe an impressive character in this artist’s work. Modern in her ideas, she demonstrates to be an artist with an academic maturity who can have the luxury of breaking with the standard forms to then dream in a world of colors that transports the observer into a fantasy. Once there, you could not tell if you are in the cosmos or in the ocean depths of a created or dreamed existence.
I insist in referring to Nancy as an artist, since it is clear by observing her pictorial works that she has gone beyond the two dimensions present in a canvas’ surface, manipulating a third one and learning how it works on sculpture as well.
She is not a painter, she is an artist who, I hope, will not let the obstacles on the road debilitate what she already possesses today. This gift must show itself more and more in her coming works so we can continue to dance in this celebration of colors and shapes built by the creative world of Nancy Hernández’ works. 

 

Graciela Distéfano
  

Nancy Hernández and her itineraries
 
 
                            “We do not have to change the narrations of our stories, but transform our understanding of what living and being in other times and spaces- human and historic ones- mean”.
                                                      Kevin Power.
 
Nancy Hernández’s story begins in Guamini , province of Buenos Aires. The marks of her itinerary are stressed by her path through Architecture as an unfinished career. It is from here that she begins her approach to painting. When she is in Buenos Aires, she rejects academic offers from official institutions and instead looks for an Art workshop for another kind of knowledge. But as it is known, not all teachers are alike. There are those who impress indelible stamps on his /her disciples marking predetermined courses, those who help by giving the tools and the techniques, and those who also add the adventure of exploring through their own worlds. Ernesto Manili, Nancy’s teacher, was the latter for her. She likes talking about him. She remembers his figure, his denial of excess, mainly his simple, honest warmth for he was her source, her starting point; the rest was being built on the way.
This route took her to the warm Caribbean seas and to an island of the Dutch Antilles; Aruba. “Aruba is the light and the back door of the Caribbean”- the artist evokes- “because those imaginary paradises for the wealthy and carefree vacationers have a hard background for the permanent residents”. That is why it is an evident effort to dedicate
 time to painting. It can also be added that little by little she was growing and creating her own poetics from a landscape of crystal water and multicolor fish; a manner that was giving her a place in the Caribbean Art world, world she entered as a guest in the Bienal de Cuenca (Ecuador) and Santo Domingo. In this way, she was starting her own contacts and universe of knowledge.
 
Cultural image of the landscape
 
It is in this way how the artist, through the landscape, transmits her concept of nature: she either denies it or affirms it; she captures it with fidelity or interprets it according to her state of mind. And it is also a pictorial field of experimentation in the affirmation of an autonomous genre.
 That is why when her compass turns to Argentina, fate takes her to another landscape, completely different, to the sunny Mendocinian lands in a spot called La Llave, in the department of San Rafael.
 Obviously, it is an abrupt cultural clash: from the warm waters to the dry lands; from the world of fashion tourism to the efforts of the country man in the vineyards and olive groves. The Grape Harvest impressed her and that impact is present in her paintings.
 She takes in the cultural image of the landscape, as visual testimony of the relation between man and nature. In this path between what is sacred and what is feared, between the desire for power and contemplation; between respect and destruction; art helps her to know nature and appreciate it. It helps her to penetrate in other depths. A
cultural dynamics with which the artist counts through her characters, capturing the unknown with her eyes for what is “new” for her and for that reason she can give it a shade that surprises local people. In these landscapes of the south of Mendoza she does not turn to ordinary places of the regional painting. She could not do that as they are not for her. And the games of shades and colors only outline the ideas and mix fragments, different perspectives, dreamt connections… and from her subjectivity she contributes to a complex vision… a concept of landscape.
 

The painting as work and as search

   The mutations are the way to experiment time, space and causality.  
                                                 Margarita Schultz.
 
 
Every life is a permanent process of change; the idea is not to fear and assume that flow.
 The experience of change is always an internal experience, a decision that begins when something touches a deep fiber. And that impact, that privileged touch stresses important moments of the personal story and work of artists naturally. For whom her language is colors and shapes, her thought is built through them.
 Colors and shapes are the instruments that allow understanding and reveal the anxiety that has been generating from varied fields about the sense of cultural transformations.
 “Energía”, “Evolución”, “Niños Índigo”, “Ángeles Humanos” are part of a series around readings that marked an epoch called “New Age”. It is a kind of soft substitute for disenchanted modernist utopias, a new religion without dogma; a perspective which is between tolerance and pantheism. These readings moved Nancy, who experimented with some aspects of the puerile drawing exploring- in this way- the wealth of this growing subjectivity.
 Nancy Hernández is under this process of change that alternates painting as a reflexive-expressive flight and the collages as a recreational form, as an experience of joy whose possibilities gather the mark of mysterious coincidences, but who asks to work day by day.
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