Brainstorm

Each painting by Claudio Herrera is the precipitated synthesis and summation of a system. It hypnotises us immediately with its constructive complexity, then just as quickly hints at its character as a fleeting document, heralding its imminent collapse. In Herrera each piece is both specific and provisional, homogeneous object and gaseous fabric on the border of disintegration. It is the reflection of a tense operation for which the pictorial plane is the place of irresolution disguised as exactitude. It is a record of conflict rather than conciliation, a murky sketch of a subjectivity that - whilst manifesting itself as ungraspable - gives clues that lead us to suspect its nature and its reliability as a philosophical reference.

The painting of Claudio Herrera is a painting of contamination, of multiple interferences breaking forth from some region between the artist’s current of imagination and his intellectual reflection. The painter-medium enters into a trance to whip up all the visual elements of the piece in the drool of an illustrated ectoplasm: stretched by the over-exposure of a highly designed visual architecture, as natural as a physical phenomenon and yet suddenly appearing denaturalised.

The relation, discussion or contradiction between drawing and writing, brush-mark and smudge, precision and error, geometry and grammar, typography and topography are orchestrated alternately in romantically resonant impulses through the extensive chords of a pallet at times watery, at times electrified and caustic. Even in the more impetuous zones of verbosity, the tonal combinations interweave rhythmically with the infinite networks that expand themselves, in its crackling vibration, like a coral reef in the unknown two-dimensional sea to which they invite us to enter; a sea without horizon, centre or terra firma.

From these equilibriums – meticulously constructed from the sonorous collision of contrasts and, in particular, from the dissimulated selective contiguity of the colours and lines – emerges a Herrera that silently exercises the wisdom of measured palpitation. It is more secret than evident, yet never loses sight of a precise vocation for the spectacular. The accumulation, the superimposition, the jungle-dense interweaving of lines and the virtuoso counterpoints in the jigsaw puzzle of segments are all concentrated on the internal nuclei of this nebula, fragmented from scope onto canvas. It is a sort of organism that grows of its own account, equidistant from any attempts at interpretation and beyond the rational induction to which its exasperated logic drives; the logic of hypertrophied webs and most particularly of the phrases and photographs grafted onto the canvas and forced to integrate a stylistic order that is at once related and essentially opposed.

Not in any way abandoning his obsessive equalisation of tone, chromatics and graphic pulse to realise the photographic insertion in the pictorial medium, Herrera insists specifically that this ‘objective’ inclusion is not only an element of signification in relation to the presumed ‘content’ but also a cyst of language, something that has landed there by necessity and not for convenience. It is here that one begins to suspect that much of the approach does not depend (as one could suppose) on temperate control, but rather on discomfort and the intrusion of adhered additions. It is as if the painting were, apart from an autonomous universe, also an irresistible magnet or a carnivorous plant that devoured all signs, alphabet, taxonomy and notations flying over the gravitational field of the painter.

In his patchworks, Herrera manages the delicate margin between the cut and the transition with ease. The space is illusory and also neutral; the rhythms come and go, from front to back, up and down; the bland verticals and horizontals extend themselves in strict harmony with the dimensions of the supports. Suddenly, we believe ourselves to be in front of a meticulous cartography elaborated by one who has forgotten the notion of the world, who conserves only erroneous data of it - ghostly echoes, rhetorical images, false statistics, blotted archives - and who nevertheless tries to trace an urgent map that at least establishes a fanciful orientation, all mixed up with rhizomes that seemingly pulled up from an illiterate botanic garden, or a catalogue of ornaments attacked by termites.

Perhaps it is his condition as sociologist, plus a grade of contemporary conscience between tragic and critical (including cynicism, bitter humour and gibe), that makes the strong individuality of Herrera a disconcerting parade of masks. Whilst the exercise of his skills shows him to be sure of himself, a subscriber to the enjoyment of an elegant and luxurious practice, he transfigures the ultimate meaning of that delectation with his strategy of heterogeneous quotes, truncated sentences, obscure appeals, molecules of manifestos and fossil remains of a gregarious monologue that feeds as much on a fevered cultural dream as on some entangled vigil. There is also the Herrera that wants to be a predatory sniper, constituting his speech from the capturing of voices; a falsetto stylist that makes profession and profusion of strangeness and difference, with otherness as his only possible identity. And the freak commentator - burnt, partial, confused but impassioned - of distant decades of high militant and ideological voltage. It is as if the temporal statute of his paintings were to leak a paranoid archaeology, affected by melancholia, nonsense politics and the dislocated graffiti of coded messages that preserve from their urban predecessors a type of lyrical tension alongside. They dissolve in a more conceptual combat - the semiotic battle - and go knocking one against the other on the same tormented, impenetrable surface. It is as if an adolescent Gargantua, invaded by a civilising inflation, were to scribble ceaselessly on the covers of his schoolbooks and stick universal souvenirs all over.

Eduardo Stupia