FEDERICO HERRERO

The exhibition title Caimitos refers to the star apple tree native to Central America and the Caribbean. The tree itself stands as a symbol of the landscape of the artist’s homeland, Costa Rica, not merely as a physical place, but as a terrain shaped by lived experience. These impressions take form through a series of new paintings whose intimate scale creates a sense of closeness and quiet attention.

[...] In his intricate post-geometrical compositions, 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 Rafaël 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 Zeitgeist 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. [...]

Excerpt from a text by Jérôme Sans