Juan Fernando Herrán: Ni héroes ni mártires

How does one give meaning to what is missing, a space to absence, to silences? How to evidence the voids left by non told stories in the middle of the hysteria of an already saturated world that threatens to succumb at any moment?

Juan Fernando Herrán has made from the observation of these gaps in history and from the mechanisms of their silencing the core of his practice, his raw material. For thirty years, he has followed the traces of invisible actors, crossing the margins of the territory of men and official discourses.

Overlapped in the exhibition space, these silent stories come to life in the shape of installations, videos, photos, and sculptures. Its organic materiality, its manual and careful execution and sometimes, its monumental forms reinforce the performative dimension of the works. This corporeality traverses, in different modalities, the whole work of the artist charging it with a noticeable potential.

The political or the religious often capture the intensity of the sensitive – this emotion provoked by an image or a strong experience- to become an instrument to the benefit of the dominant narrative. Opposite this posture, the artist opens to the viewer, through experience, a thinking space. Without cynicism he reveals the flaws of those who abuse our need to believe, our desire for the sacred: heroes forsake their promising faiths, corruption reigns in its shinning armor, paradise is nothing more than mere publicity for sacrifice.