Diango Hernández

Sancti Spíritus, 1970. Lives in Düsseldorf

Diango Hernández’s artistic practices bear a direct relation to Caribbean tropical culture and the Cuban sociocultural and geopolitical context. The trade embargoes and economic crises, the Cuban/US conflict, the socialist ideology, and pre- and post-revolution Cuba are all recurrent themes in his sculptural and pictorial constructions. With strong discursive capacity and synthetic power, Hernández’s works articulate fictional realities and poetic actions. In Leg Me, Chair Me, Love me, on-show at the Triennial, a three-legged chair teeters precariously while the missing fourth leg travels around in a circle, reconnecting with the chair intermittently, as its orbit allows. When the chair becomes briefly whole, a light turns on overhead, only to switch off again as the leg continues on its way.

A designer and architect, Hernández spent ten years with Ordo Amoris Cabinet, a collective of Cuban artists and designers who create objects that fully embrace economic, material and technological instability as core attributes, in a way similar to the jerry-built aesthetic known as gambiarra in Brazil. The result was a hybrid created out of all manner of raw materials provisionally endowed with the form and function of a “designer” object.

[F.J.]