NYAB Event - Javier Gatti-Hernandez Exhibition

Javier Gatti-Hernandez Exhibition

CUE Art Foundation

This event has ended.

Artist's Statement

I suffer from a common human condition: I am obsessed with love and death. At the onset of making these works, two things occurred which consumed my thoughts: 1.) A close cousin, both in age and sentiment, died suddenly of a cancer I believed she would overcome, and 2.) a new job made it so that I was estranged from my fiancee for the better part of six months. Both events left me alone and conjuring answers to the question: "Where are they?"

The figures painted in this series remain partially obscured. They are depictions of the fading memory of two people blurred into one: an amalgam of love and death, and "object of desire." While this "object" has been a recurring theme in my work, this new series is more specifically a meditation on obscurity: that which lies beyond what we can physically see.

This absence of my cousin and my fiancee became my point of reference, like a horizon line. These paintings have a centralized composition designed to confront the viewer by placing them at the far end of a path toward the subject and what lies beyond. The horizon becomes a point where the natural world which I am able to quantify and the supernatural world begin to dissolve. As a child, I'd lay awake and stare at the point where two walls faded into a dark corner and I'd see a man standing in that space watching and waiting for me to fall asleep. This type of childhood hallucination is what I believe to be the source of mythology.

This compulsion to qualify the unknown is what inspires my paintings. Oil paint supplies me with a crude spackle for filling in the gaps between what I know and what I imagine. Oils allow me to start with a loose, abstract concept and build up layers of images whose lines can grown and alter as a tangible idea is realized. It is the medium that provides for me the least amount of resistance in the creation of an image.