The Romans gave the name stellae errantes to seven bodies that did not follow the turning of the heavens. While every other light held its fixed place, these seven advanced, paused and went backwards according to a logic of their own. The name was not meant as praise. In Latin, errare meant both to wander and to go wrong: whatever leaves the established course first appears as a fault in the system.
Errantes, the painting that gives the presentation its title (oil on linen, 200 x 250 cm), stages a battle. The genre, which the Baroque used to narrate conquests and secure the prestige of the victors, is rendered here in a tenebrist key, with light cutting the bodies out of a dark ground. Yet the bodies in combat come from cartoons. Caricatured figures carry the gravity of a historical scene, and the painting refuses to choose between the two registers: it holds them at the same temperature, with no hierarchy between the venerated and the banal.
Displacement is not only the subject of the work but also its method. The names of those seven bodies are themselves the product of transfers: deities that changed language and pantheon as they passed from Mesopotamia to Greece and from Greece to Rome, and that still name the days of the week in many European languages. No single culture invented them. Syncretism is not an accident of migration but its most constant outcome: what moves gets mixed, and what is mixed is never pure again.
Alongside Errantes is Fever Dreams II, six medium-format paintings (oil on wood panel, 61 x 46 cm each) that return to the method of Fever Dreams, the series Hernández showed at Isabel Croxatto Galería earlier this year. Museum sculptures, toys, street corners and figures from mass culture are captured through photogrammetry and reassembled into scenes that obey no common scale. Blurring and soft edges keep what is happening from settling. These are images that seem remembered rather than seen.
The death of Boat Memory and the sorrow of FitzRoy (oil on linen, 170 x 190 cm, 2025) provides the counterweight. Boat Memory was one of the four Fuegians Captain FitzRoy took to England in 1830, and he died of smallpox at the naval hospital in Plymouth a few weeks after arriving. He had not chosen to travel. The painting stages his wake with bodies borrowed from Velázquez, Titian and Poussin, setting European painting, which never recorded this story, to tell it with its own figures. To wander can also mean to be moved by others, and the show does not separate the one from the other.
Ozymandias closes from the opposite end. A mass of entwined bodies, somewhere between classical ruin and contemporary accumulation, rises and sinks at once against a flat ground that makes it illusory. The title comes from Shelley’s sonnet and its fallen monument in the desert. What is fixed also moves, only more slowly: centres shift, empires turn to rubble, and their material is left for others to use.
Hernández was born in Chilean Patagonia and works in London, the city where many of the objects he photographs and brings back into painting were once gathered. Errantes is offered here not as a story of origin but as a position: that of the passage between periphery and centre, where images warp and where everything later called tradition is made.
Gallery
