Palobras

Carmelo Hernando

17/01/93. (Sala 146)

When P A L O B R A S reaches 13 years (plus ten) nobody will be able to conmemorate the centenary of D A D A (Zurich, 1916. Cabaret Voltaire) *, unless a photomontage is kept as a password. An indexical sign that identifies us as an urban culture, this cornet -usare e dopo ejectare-which returns disrupted in your dearest private passion. Marilyn in el Libro de los Muertos,I.

Carmelo Hernando reveals 50 per cent, half Barcelona, half New York of his sixteen years of work of fascination for something we call time, history and that we consume as “visual”.It comes from his original brand that resorts to the wisdom of the classics by
Grosz, Heartfield, Joseph Renal whilst uniting head and heart to just come into contact with the real effect of photography and create new proof of the truthof representational politics.

There is an uncompromising point, with style, someone besides Cocteau, will always have to invent it by guilt transferred in Photomontage that will only exist after you when you look at your own exorcized self. In between the October revolution, the year of the aerial locomotion and the end of the liberal ideology; in between the union of oppositions in the cold war, like a social life generation at the supermarket. The happy years with Douglas Sirk films and sticker collections for your sticker album, years of stilettos claiming falsehood as the paradigm, years that exhibit desire of how to catch that black cat that prowls the dark room, tracking used and evidenced materials in other contexts, years of abyss for a strategy of meaning.

The vast majority of Carmelo Hernando’s pieces were created for one means of Communication or the other, it entered the Expo circuit, they are coded according to its chronology, uses, measurements, text and from now on, its collector will be added. They are original pieces that grope a time of accumulation of miscellaneous goods amongst which he circulates, its like a rising value, an imaginary which is revalued because it was shown in the media, because it is constitutive of art in the Post-industrial Society. By the media and for the media.

At La Sala Vinçon scarce works from 1992 go on sale, selling price starts at 140,000 pesetas, and original works are released from 33,000 pesetas, with obsessive stamps of the seventies, with recurrig themes such as “Geranium’s Revenge” with “Snowflake “ that looks at you the same way a Bengal Tiger would. It’s a time when you hold a photomontage like a tamer grabs the beast’s mouth for breath, where a phosphorescent souvenir reminds you of your duty to grow in another world while saying: I passed here.

And so, in this way the action of devising, cutting, moving, pasting, moving your fingers and extending your desire to the other to drive home that wonder of Iconic Books, will infringe once again, the morbid link of that unpredictable, speculative chain in the figure of a potential heir that tomorrow gets to manage in a white gloved way, all this tense, slow and cold time.In which nothing is a thing of the past.

Margarita Ledo Andión. Compostela, 1993

*(Others may prefer 1918 and Berlín).