Federico Herrero: Montañas bajo el mar

Painting can look back at you¹

Jérôme Sans

For his exhibition at Luisa Strina, Federico Herrero presents a series of paintings alongside a predominant in-situ floor-painting in the gallery's space made up of his emblematic brightly colored geometric compositions. Known for his site-specific wall paintings and canvases composed of vibrant organic shapes, the Costa Rican artist understands poetry as visual language and seeks to find art in all realms of life. By creating abstract landscapes that are inextricably linked to nature and beings, and by bringing his work outside of the traditional canvas, he is always aiming to abolish the barrier between art and everyday life. Through his large-scale paintings on canvas but also on walls, floors, ceilings or windows, he extracts vibrations, movements, sounds from shapes and colors, infusing musicality and new meaning into the spaces he inhabits.

In his intricate post-geometrical compositions, Federico Herrero paints forms that de-form. He brings to life irregular, soft, almost liquid shapes. Fashioning a new universe, one that is playful and interactive, the painter seems to enter into an aesthetic of self-generative images, in the manner of digital artists like Dutch-Brazilian Rafael Rozendaal. While the latter, considered a pioneer of Internet Art, creates virtual works in which shapes literally move, spread, grow, bounce off each other in permanent movement, Federico Herrero uses the static pictorial medium to convey continuous motion. His boisterous fluid geometry seems to vibrate on the even surfaces, and stretch, expand, inflate. Painting for Federico Herrero is neither flat nor static. Rather, he seems to make geometry inhale and exhale, as well as extremely light, as if weightless. With an aesthetic that could recall that of video games, he plays with the paradoxical boundaries between stillness and motion, flatness and the tri-dimensional, silence and musicality, and seems to seize within the classical medium of painting the Zeitgest of the digital age. Sometimes over-saturated, his compositions are like echoes of today's abundance of images, that flow without beginning nor end, and that are thrust into the vortex of endless, self-generated, uncontextualized information - into the insatiable modern ouroboros of content. These shapes, stacked on top of each other, as if endlessly generating new ones, seem to lead to the magma, the mountain of images of our time. One could be reminded of Ugo Rondinone's famous Mountains, in which colossal brightly colored boulders are stacked on top of each other. Both the Swiss and Costa Rican artists share a sense of monumentality, a Brancusian quest to represent infinity, to climb ever higher in an Endless Column of images. Yet, Federico Herrero's shapes are almost never orderly stacked on top of each other. Rather, they emerge from every direction, and seem to defy any notion of verticality. His entangled forms recall at times digital glitches, or pixelated images that deny the viewer access to the full content. With his controlled yet vigorous brushstrokes, and his ordered yet organic compositions, Federico Herrero astutely creates the new landscapes of today, where content is profuse, horizontal, fluid, in constant motion. Alive.

Expansiveness in his work also relates to architecture and the urban structures present in his Latin American hometown of San Jose. He states: "the way I construct the picture is very related the fragmentation of what I see in my country where urban structures are often in an unfinished state²." Through this visible obsession with an urban body that is never-ending, rarely finalized, his work is intimately linked to movement. As if filling up or emptying out, his paintings breathe. The artist is particularly interested in the way forms interact with each other, in the particular tension that arises within these ambiguous, liminal spaces where shapes touch. These intricate dynamics of his forms possess an inherent, enigmatic poetry similar to that of notes and sound. In the manner of a painter like Etel Adnan, Federico Herrero translates color into language, into poetry. This profound interest in transferring color and shapes into a universal message is fundamental in his work, as he seeks for balance and harmony in his compositions to better understand the world around him.

Indubitably linked to the legacies of twentieth century abstract art, his reliance on shapes and color to produce meaning positions him in the footsteps of Wassily Kandinsky's famous color theory and the Bauhausian approach to the power of color and form. A century later, Federico Herrero seems to brings the Russian father of abstraction's theories to the present epoque, with less precise, more glitchy, fluid shapes, that resonate in new ways in the midst of the digital age. With his rounded forms that are not always clearly defined, he defies the sharpness of geometric abstraction, resists "hard edge" painting - a term first coined by art historian Jules Langsner in 1959 to characterize the work of four abstract artists from California and which later gained wider breadth to describe contemporary American geometric abstract painting. His canvases could recall an artist from that movement like Ellsworth Kelly through his interest in shapes, an economy of form, in the fullness of colors. Yet, his work is also removed from this style because of its liquidity, its ambiguity, like a subtle nod to today's fluidity. Federico Herrero rather belongs to "soft edge" painting. As the artist himself puts it: "I have always been fascinated with creating a work in which it is hard to define where it begins and where it ends³". Like a reinvented all-over, his canvases resemble the ever-changing sky above our heads, above the modern city that sees no limits. Navigating his canvases is like being lost in a continuous maze, as if running in one of the infamous labyrinths of a computer game.

While working in-situ, Federico Herrero intimately dialogues with the immediacy of the space and reacts to its specificities. It comes as no surprise that the artist began his studies in architecture, at the Universidad Veritas, before studying painting at the Pratt Institute in New York. His background in architecture informs his interest in painting in the public realm, his questionings on how space in general shapes perception, and his quest to create new collective spaces with his art. Also famous for his abstract wall paintings, American artist Soll LeWitt famously stated in 1970 about his parietal work "I wanted to do a work of art that was as two-dimensional as possible⁴." Federico Herrero's work appears as starkly opposed to this statement, as it rather seeks to defy the flatness with forms that grow out of its canvas or walls. Unlike the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt whose compositions were neatly conceived upstream to allow others to do it for him, Federico Herrero relies on improvisation, always attentive to the space he works in. He cites the surrealist Roberto Matta as an influence, one of the reasons being that the Chilean artist started his compositions with no preconceived idea. Following that same process, Federico Herrero's canvases possess an abstract expressionist quality to them at times, a certain gesturalism, an organic flow, a spontaneity fostered in his method that discards preparatory drawings.

Heir to a legacy that dates back to the start of the 20^th century's central American muralist tradition, Federico Herrero's wall paintings stem from his enduring ambition to bring artworks outside of the white cube, to eradicate the distinction between real, everyday life and art. While the socialist muralist tradition of painters such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros was a way to express an opposition to the dictatorships and violent regimes, the Costa Rican artist's murals appear visually apolitical. His approach liberates itself from the weight of iconography and history that is generally associated to the tradition of muralism. Rather, his wall paintings appear as an ode to the present moment, like a sheet of music one can walk into, imagine and listen to. Much like music is considered a universal language, he seizes color and form as a common ground for all. His work in the Pelican State Playground in 2016 near the South London Gallery, is a literal example of this ambition, as he painted the pavement for children to walk and play on. The political and social aspect of his work lies within the notion of community engagement that is deeply embedded in his practice. He is always seeking to create new structures to connect with others, to slow down both collectively and individually, in the otherwise frantic, hurried quotidian of modernity.

A parallel can be drawn between the entangled forms that govern his compositions and human behavior. The interaction between his shapes are "similar to how we as humans interact. Some people take more space, some are narrower, others smaller, or very intense⁵." In this way, some of his paintings are oversaturated, with large shapes that bounce off each other, others spacious with tiny spread out dots, as if floating on the surface, like molecules. Sometimes, he reduces an image to the bare minimum, as is the case in his paintings of a whale, a mountain or a boat on top of water. With a specific focus on the line of horizon - a common thread that runs throughout many of his works in this exhibition - he presents a world that can tip over, where the certainty of flow is unclear and subject to all possible turbulence. The co-relation with human behavior is also inherent in his use of color. Understood as relational, color reacts and changes according to what it has next to it. "We are really the same⁶", says the artist. These parallels he makes translate his deeply human, social approach to painting, as he connects abstraction to tangible, everyday life.

His ambition to blur the boundary between life and art, which can be traced back to a growing trend in the 1990s when Federico Herrero began his artistic career, manifests itself clearly in his artistic approach to the quotidian. His photographs of brightly painted patterns and objects he sees in the street, which he calls his "found paintings", reveal his fascination for how painting feeds itself into the fabric of everyday life, whether it be in street curbs, traffic signs, transit lines, painted houses and pavements. Art to Federico Herrero can be found in all realm of public life. For that reason, he has always shown great interest in paintings that exist outside of the traditional canvas. Already in 2003, at the Havana Biennale, he presented his Mapa mundi, a painting inside a pool into which visitors were invited to swim and experience the work from within, with their bodies. In the manner of artists such as Hélio Oiticica or Jesus Rafael Soto, both creators of Penetrable works, or of works like Carla Accardi's Tents, which invite viewers to literally penetrate into colors and shapes, Federico Herrero approaches painting as an immersive experience, as a navigation, a knowledge related to the body and the senses.

In this exhilaration through sensorial experiences, Federico Herrero's work stands like a cheerful hymn to life, an ode to the most basic elements that shape one's existence: senses, shapes and colors. It is within this search for purity and through these formal considerations, that the Costa Rican artist creates new landscapes, new spaces to reimagine the world, the present and the future. In this quest to create meaning through abstraction, his relationship with his work is not unidirectional only: "I'm triggered by the possibility that paintings can know something about you, that they can understand how they should be and can guide me⁷." One must be prepared to look deep into Federico Herrero's works and welcome an open, reciprocal conversation with them. To him, you are not the only one looking. Painting can look back at you.