Hernández’s work is fantastical, meticulous, powerful

The Cuban painter Vicente Hernández’s solo exhibition “Of the Real and Magnificent” is a creative tour de force.

A native of the harbor town Batabanó, Hernández just completed an artist residency at the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, and this show is on view now through Jan. 9 at Charlotte’s LaCa Projects.

Hernández’s paintings are vivid and original. The fantastical “Las Novias del Surgidero” (The Brides of Surgidero), for example, is expansive in vision and complexity, and meticulous in detail. It, like most of Hernández’s paintings, is episodic: Several airborne dirigibles, in different space/time relationships, seemingly fuse before our eyes. This dream-like imagining, together with the artist’s stunning realism, portrays whole communities in a moment of transit and uncertainty.

To dramatize the anxiousness, the artist uses foreshortened perspective and sweeping, elliptical lines to create compositions in which the swirling skies seems poised to engulf the land. These devices create uneasy images of nature, with a powerful impact that is both visual and emotional.

In many of his compositions, dirigibles, large boats and aircraft are laden with city dwellings, suggesting the journeys these towns’ citizens long to make, and their seemingly endless struggles to create a meaningful life. We’re not sure of the voyagers’ destinations, but the whirlpool-like oceans, curvilinear landscapes and hurricane skies through which they travel are tenuous, circular and suggestive of unending repetition.

“In Cuba,” Hernández explained in an Observer interview, “we have two hurricanes. One created by the damaging effects of the weather and the need to reclaim our lives. The other is the political hurricane. Nothing happens there. Cuba is 55 years behind.”

“La Máquina del Tiempo (The Time Machine)” epitomizes the artist’s perspective. A hybrid car/plane, beached upon the Cuban shore, has a mast the artist has painted with a skewered, warped and sprung watch whose disemboweled gears spring outward and spiral downward. In the distant sky, another landscape hovers, perhaps suggestive of a desired destination yet to be attained. By using the conceits that painting offers, Hernández fashions the psychological landscape he and fellow Cubans experience as they try to make a better life for themselves.

“La Isla su Esperanza (The Island Hope)” metaphorically brings into relief the civic struggle to which the artist refers. A hopeful vessel’s hull is breached by the roiling ocean while a locust eats away at the ship’s main sail. An auspicious beginning has ended in frustration and disaster.

In another, “Otra Utopia del Piñero (Another Utopia of Piñero),” a fiery sky frames a ship that lies derelict in the midst of a harbor ghost town as a husband and wife bear witness from their mule-pulled wagon to the ostensible futility of life.

“The people in this town live far, far away,” said Hernández. “Their situation is they don’t know anything about the world outside. They’ve built flying machines and boats to get out to learn about the world. The dreams, riches are all things that people want to have to build a new life. They need to take their culture, history and bring it to the new place.”

Hernández’s “Of the Real and Magnificent” is a tribute to the unshakable spirit of his countrywomen and men, describing the goals each of us share and the sacrifices citizens are willing to make to achieve their dreams.

This story was originally published November 24, 2015 at 7:20 PM with the headline "Hernández’s work is fantastical, meticulous, powerful."