Hernan Ardila

Hernan Ardila - Untitled, digital drawing

Biography of the Artist: 1963 Born in Bogota, Colombia. Since 1990 lives and works in Barcelona, Spain. Multidisciplinary artist trained as a painter, printmaker and photographer; develops his work in painting, sculpture, drawing, digital drawing and photography. He has exhibited his work internationally in Spain, France, Netherlands, Belgium, England, Germany and Colombia.

 

The non-figurative pieces, drawings and canvases that make up the work of Hernán Ardila (Colombia, 1964), characterized by the preeminence of form and line, hard-edged color planes and compositional fragmentation, focus both on the spatial value of form and on the tempo of repetitions and variations of line, color and material. His work is largely conceived as an installation. Although the spatial dimension was already present in his previous oil works, it takes on greater importance after the experiences of assemblage. His task is limited to the union and arrangement of lines, shapes, color fields, fragments of wood, plastic or metal. Proof of the unitary character of his activity is the use that the computer has acquired in the development of his work. The digitalization of the material, either by photography or from simulated forms, allows him to visualize in advance the relationships between the elements. Likewise, the assembly by means of digital replicas starts from the material and constitutes its development, its modification, its integration with other elements in a relationship of meaning... In his work there is a deep and heartfelt inquiry, although at the same time light, sensible and concrete, about the sense and feeling of things. But precisely for this reason the search for accuracy in the relationships must always be accompanied by a lack of certainty that requires not only the absence of meaning, but also a certain disposition of the elements in the whole that makes their legibility difficult. Matter and instability, this sum could synthesize all his work. What really interests Ardila is the possibility of affecting a form, of altering it in multiple ways. In this sense, he always tries to operate where things have not yet acquired a direction. His work is filled with intervened forms, elements in crisis placed in relation to an order of things that keeps them at the limit, on the edge of the abyss, in disequilibrium; about to start moving, to jump into the void, to cease to be or, what is the same thing, to become something else.