José Antonio Hernández-Diez

Such paradox, which is possible in the intercrossing between the forms of an object as vague but also as mechanically complex as a bearing – ball bearing or roller bearing – and the grave silhouette of the serpent portrayed in the more universal mythology that Hernández-Diez renders, on this occasion, in series of drawings and also of sculptures/installations that run parallel to them, turns out to be strangely familiar, unexpectedly compatible with some brain frequencies and certain social territories, at least, those belonging to the current time.

It is not in the juxtaposition of opposites, integrated in the same place through the material agency of the work; nor in the transversal of a hidden codex that would seemingly arrange the discourse as a pretext for finding types of correspondences that might characterize earlier works by Hernández-Diez such as Sagrado corazón activo/Active Sacred Heart (1991) or Arroz con mango/Rice and Mango (1997); but rather in the space, if you will, in the huge distance between the elements and the work, that the meaning is to be found in the artist ́s most recent production. In this space, in the remoteness and the permanent suspicion of its components, there is a particular story: the agony of an order, a hierarchy, or a destiny which comes down to a mechanism. Such flight, such absence, can only travel along thought through intuition and fear. Hernández-Diez shows his shamanism by constructing perimeters whose depth and scope can not originate in or be contained by words.

It is particularly noteworthy that this sort of Ghost in the shell, trapped in a group of images, should not speak of a particular culture or a specific generation or individual, but rather of a series of symbols and graphic signs that barter the identity and singularity of their origin and move around obviating it; such the case of the series of highly detailed drawings partially superimposing on paper the cavities of a bearing and insubstantial churches, or, analogously, colorful snakes that when devouring one another, are transformed into sculptures of bicycles.

Apparently, seen in perspective, that same curve describes the work of this author who is a resident of the Catalonian capital. From the context of some conflicts derived from political, technological or religious frontiers, a framework that may also make reference to a world that perhaps we tread, he has gradually shifted – don ́t the kants and marxes (2002), made with shoe logos, go in the same direction? – towards prefiguring a cosmos in which conflicts usually appear rather in repetition and the dissolution of differences, in the death not only of what is sacred but also of what is secret, and which probably also speak of an era marked by the standardization of methods and ways, acceleration, interconnectivity and the movements of persons, contents, money and images, which are often identified with the globalization process.

The wheels, the message

Hernández-Diez explains that the bearings, those intricate devices comprised of oils and small balls that make modern rotation possible – and this includes skates and lunar vehicles alike– are in themselves a fascinating science, since the different combinations of oils and balls may result in different levels of performance, or durability, acceleration or potency, and they embody the art of conceiving and choosing the proportion that may provide a perfect harmony among the parts.

He also refers to the way in which a micro-physics of present-day interpersonal relations may be found in this society of viscosities. In the meantime, I see the artist immersed in oil, rolling inside a great piece of machinery, whose dimensions we not only ignore but we cannot even imagine – following the bearings come the wheel, the axes, the board, on top of it, the skater —, transformed into a small ball, isolated from friction, and with a minimum contact with that rest that moves and rotates without any apparent relation.

Beyond this place, there are serpents

On a certain plane, the common space rather than the symbol is what in fact makes the whole possible. It is a certain reading, an identical one, which has found a metaphor there, in the type of society, of relationship and of order that develops from the composition and not from the correlations which may arise from the mix of mythologies once they are re-combined.

Therefore, if there exists a possibility to glimpse an alternate meaning, halfway between the millenary semantics of the serpent and the autistic perfection of the shapes that originate in the technological religion of the 21st century, then I have obviated it. Among other things, because I share Hernández-Diez ́s temporary residence, the city of Barcelona, and we have somehow explored the ruins of the civilization that made way for a time of identical, predictable and efficiently indifferent discourses. In the dormant cells, in the parallel universes.

I have always thought that Hernández-Diez cultivated a conceptual dissonance whose greatest virtue was, and continues to be, the cognitive incongruence that invades the spectator when faced with the unusual mixture of his elaborate artistic iconographies and the need to find immediate referents. Nothing more representative of this than the skateboards made of fried pigskin, which are later devoured in a video by a pack of hounds in La hermandad/The Brotherhood (1994).

Rupture can be prefigured in the artist ́s shamanistic intuition, in his capacity to become one, if this were possible, with the spirit of the times and talk about them, incarnating other voices. From the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and in the context of a Master ́s Course in Social Psychology, intuitions have also led me to attempt to narrate the globalization processes from the place where they actually take place, that is to say, the street, and not a virtual world. To this end, and based on the clinical diagnosis of Fuga disociativa/Dissociative escape, a psychiatric disorder that I identify with somnambulism, multiple personality or amnesia, and that refers, in sum, to two or more mental processes or contents not associated or integrated1, the idea of the Disociedades practice and mechanism groups, not groups of individuals, as, for example, tourists, the use of drugs or terrorism. A dimensionality of existence, of this belated capitalism that thinks us and populates us in multiple personalities, lagoons and geographies.

In sum: regarding two processes not integrated into a single entity, Show us what haste is enunciates a theater of dissociation, and –why not?– another of the unsocietal forms that abound in these perimeters these days.

After that, beyond the skateboards, the cunning, violet serpent will be waiting.