Rodrigo Hernández
What else did I see?
Rodrigo Hernández: Installation view, What else did I see?, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, September 3 –October 23, 2025.Photo by Dan Bradica. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
At Tanya Bonakdar Gallery What else did I see?, an exhibition of new work by Rodrigo Hernández. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.
Rodrigo Hernández works across drawing, painting, relief, sculpture and installation, to create a personal constellation of images.
New York, October 14, 2025, by W Hearne Pardee
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Based in Mexico City but trained in Europe, Rodrigo Hernandez brings a deep ethnographic sensibility to his Mexican heritage and opens global perspectives. He’s made immersive installations of wall paintings linked to Mexican murals, but his current show at Tanya Bonakdar centers on emptiness, on a meandering table-top grid that spirals inward, connecting significant objects and conflating the space of the gallery with the space of his mind. Like a piazza of di Chirico, but with Renaissance perspective inverted, it evokes a state of semiotic flux, of migrating meanings; it engages our urge to find a place in the world, or at least some human contact.
The exhibition spans two galleries, the larger space is devoted to Hernandez’s efforts to reconstruct memories as they merge with dreams. Like Proust, Hernandez investigates a “privileged moment,” a conversation with his father in the garden of the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon, designed by Japanese architect Kenzo Kuma, along with a subsequent epiphany on an airplane when he realizes that “Kuma” means “bear” in Japanese. Fascinated by human interactions with animals, he makes a painting of a bear in hibernation – a state of sleep that humans share. His paintings combine the matter-of-fact realism of Magritte with a softer luminosity akin to Gerhard Richter and a feeling for the tactile immediacy of fur. A hanging construction opposite the painting initiates a dialogue between words and images: it composes the Japanese character for “bear” out of colored, curvilinear segments of papier mâché. He also draws and paints in meticulous detail the curving, tiled roof of the museum (“kuma” also means “wave” in Greek), which gives birth to a spiral and to another totemic animal, a snail; he conceives of the overall installation as a “character”- a complex image-sign composed of elements of information and links to other signs. Shifts in scale play a key role in generating semiotic displacements, such as that from the tiny snail he photographs on his finger and paints on another small canvas, like the bear and roof, to the large spiraling meander on the central table. Extending this dreamlike process of association across the gallery, he envisions Paris as a spiral and so depicts it in a drawing and a sculptural relief.
The meander itself serves as a map for the objects along its periphery, anchored in the overall flux by weightier sculptures in bronze. His careful craftsmanship and attention to detail in varied materials enhance the symbolic weight of his images; his vision of the installation as a “character” is exemplified by a composition at the gallery door, combining a supine bronze head with a bronze snail and a hand-made paper lamp, again evoking sleep, a combination of references to Brancusi, Morandi and di Chirico, with possible roots for the snail in Mayan glyphs. In an ambiguity that runs throughout the show, the empty head can be read either as an emblem of the existential meaninglessness of modern life or as a gesture of openness to the meanings of dreams circulating in the gallery space. ​
Rodrigo Hernández: Installation view, What else did I see?, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York, September 3 –October 23, 2025.Photo by Dan Bradica. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
On the opposite wall, a framed notebook page combines small images and handwritten texts that document Hernandez’s preparations for his task of reconstruction, while within the large gallery, another such “key” displayed on the table condenses this information into a constellation of six essential images. The interplay of words and pictures recalls René Magritte’s Key of Dreams, a grid of schoolbook pictures paired with unrelated handwritten words, emphasizing the autonomy of the image-sign. In one notebook notation, Hernandez quotes Magritte: “Words sometimes only refer to themselves”. Perhaps inspired by Magritte’s more surreal inventions, Hernandez depicts a snail in flight, entitled “Time Flies”. Hernandez also quotes Magritte to the effect that an object might have another object behind it. This cryptic warning seems to apply to some sculptures in the show, like the one on the floor but also the first one on the table, with a snail in front of the boulder inscribed with the map of Paris. Hernandez is sensitive to the vulnerability suggested by such close physical contact, in the relatively vast context of the gallery.
In the neighboring project space, Hernandez transposes the heads into a new material and psychological register with a series of hammered and welded bronze reliefs. Fabricated in Portugal, they involve the unusual process of welding delicate strips of brass onto shiny metallic surfaces; laborious but beautifully crafted, they replace the refinement of the bronze heads with a naïve realism that recalls pre-Columbian wall engravings, yet without the reassuring solidity of stone. The reflective metal also works against the conventional play of light and shade associated with bas-relief, resisting the tactile appeal of chiaroscuro and imposing a stark, luminous glare. If the images themselves encourage empathy – a sleeper, a large head smelling a flower, and a giant, anthropomorphic butterfly (another totemic creature) set in a corner–- there’s underlying estrangement. Their simian features recall Frida Kahlo’s pet monkeys, but also earlier paintings Hernandez made of psychologist Harry Harlow’s cruel experiments demonstrating the emotional bonding of baby rhesus monkeys to surrogate terrycloth “mothers”. There’s an uncanny feel to an outlier among the reliefs, a panel depicting anonymous passers-by against a blank wall of skyscrapers, which returns us to the unsettled realm of di Chirico. With their feet flush to the bottom edge of the panel, the pedestrians seem part of our space. If there’s a deeper link between the galleries, it’s through Hernandez’s fascination with connected inner lives and the shared urban context of contemporary art – connected not so much through symbolic abstractions of language and images, but through tactile contact with materials, and, most fundamentally, through empathy.
Whatever it is and where I can find it, 2025
Hand hammered brass
17 7/8 x 27 3/4 x 3/4 inches
​Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York