Hernán Salamanco

The “For Sale” signs were written in block letters. They indicated the changes of ownership and modified the systems of urban belonging. Then, for Hernán Salamanco painting appeared as an exercise of denegation. The resistance Hernán Salamanco opposes to the memory of the metal signs leads him to choose materials that provide dense coverage. There can be no glazes. He must reject the academic knowledge he has acquired. To resort to classical pictorial procedures is not an option. It is necessary to cover the letters in a radical way; to recess the figural quality of a punitive typography. That is why synthetic enamel used in the domestic space to paint wood and metals appears as a balsamic substitute. I wish to think that all references to balsam remit us to the scene of Bethany. Mary Magdalene anoints the Christ ́s body to anticipate in the narrative the scene of the preparation for his entombment. The painter covers the metal sign with the purpose of deferring the effect of the collapse of the notion of home. This corresponds to an attitude that I find in some Chilean artists, who symptomatize in their work the “absence of home”, which is translated as an institutional failure.

For those of us who had to listen – disappointed – to a phrase such as “The house is in order”, what a painting produces at a symbolic level, a painting like the one Hernán Salamanco exhibits at Fundación Telefónica, in Onírico y privado, with the flames coming out of the windows, delimits the range of what we can expect from the usury of the tongue.

In Argentina there has been a house of art, both in actual and metaphorical terms. Hence, an operation such as Hernán Salamanco ́s is referred to and delimited by the wish to restore a loss. Even more so when the iconography which will be invested in the strategy of figurative occupation will be derived from the school manuals that regulated the sentimental education of his parents; of all the parents of his generation. It was during my conversation with Hernán Salamanco that I connected with the reading of the essay by Marcela Gené on the iconography of the first Peronist movement.

I point out, in this citation perspective, to the pertinence of the texts by Florencia Braga Menéndez and María Gainza on Hernán ́s work. The critique that opens fields and connects diverse discursive strata is never spoken of. We read the work of some in the furrows already opened by others. This small detail should not be overlooked. In this work, what is successfully posed is the critical representation of the “school-like” quality of one’s own painting and of its power to evoke its paleographic instances. I think about the Billiken collection that I myself discovered when I was a child, at my primary school teacher’s home. She received in Chile a graphic transference; that is, a conceptual and political transference, which reproduced the paternalism of the civilizing teacher. That was the first time I read in a magazine the word “philanthropist”.

In the neighborhood of 2001, Hernán Salamanco cannot read the same word in the signs that make of bankruptcy an emblem of the tendential fall of the profit rate. Pure words. The falling image must be rescued resorting to linear memory. I will state that his images are, in the first place, linear beings. Immediately after that, they are agglomerations of enameled areas. There is no doubt as to the fact that every use of enamel is aimed at reproducing the effect of protective handicrafts.

There is yet another element to be taken into account in Hernán Salamanco ́s formal construction. And it has to do with his artistic sociality. That is, with the importance he assigns to the associative actions of artists who construct their visibility through low-profile initiatives, who seek to establish flexible, non-invasive relationships. This implies organizing and promoting inscription procedures, without however relinquishing singularity.

For this reason I dwell upon his recognition of the role of workshops as places for the circulation of the analytic word, but also as spaces for collective self-defense. Which implies a clear notion of close and remote affiliations, as if the fact of belonging to a group should transfer a neighborhood spirit to the relations among artists. Hernán is an experienced and silent observer of neighborhood life.

In relation to a question I posed to him on the representation that is made of his position in the pictorial scene of the last decade, he resorts to a recent analytic situation. One of the things that have interested him most in recent times has been the exhibition that María Teresa Constantín staged at the Imago Art Center (OSDE Foundation). Hernán reveals to me the discovery he made when faced with this Argentine painting from between 1976 and 1985: its closeness to the works of Pablo Suárez and Juan Pablo Renzi. For him, this exhibition has the value of staging a plastic identity that suits his symbolic requirements. It allows him to cross over and secure the ties that moor the scenes of origin of his images. And they provide him the sound uncertainty of the practice of painting as reparation of an imaginary void.

Profile:

Hernán Salamanco lives and works in Buenos Aires, where he is currently preparing his next solo show at Braga Menéndez Arte Contemporáneo Gallery, in November 2006. He had his formal training at the National School of Fine Arts (Buenos Aires), and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (Belgium). He was the recipient of the National Fellowship for the Encouragement of Artistic Creation from the National Endowment for the Arts (2000). Among his solo shows, special mention may be made of the ones held at Braga Menéndez Gallery (2004) and Thomas Cohn Gallery (2002). He has shown in museums and institutions, among them the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC), University of Chile, Fundación Telefónica, Argentina, MALBA – Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, Fundación Proa, Printed Matter Inc. (New York), and Galería Belleza y Felicidad, Argentina. He participated in the 2001 and 205 editions of arteBA, and in ARCO 204. In the 1990s he was a member of the grupo Ø cero barrado, exhibiting in different non-conventional spaces in the circuit. He is internationally represented by Braga Menéndez Arte Contemporáneo Gallery, Buenos Aires, Argentina.