ABOUT FAILURE AND SUCCESS: GONZALO HERNANDEZ AT ICPNA

Hernandez revisits the paths of several contemporary Peruvian artists, such as Gloria Gomez-Sanchez and Ivan Esquivel Naito, to continue to tighten his conceptualization of the future of an artistic career, that is, its continuity or its "way of disappearing". Giving continuity to a debate on success and failure in the field of art that between Gonzalo Hernandez and Max Hernandez Calvo is more than 10 years old, the exhibition proposes a meta-reflexive framework of the intellectual field, making use of the effective procedure of distancing that enables appropriation and its corresponding historical-artistic reelaboration.

Ways of Disappearing, by Max Hernández Calvo.

Beyond its philo-mystical obfuscations and the glamour of its red-carpet events, the art world is a field of work. Starting from that premise, Gonzalo Hernandez raises the question of the sustainability of a career in the arts, taking some examples of Peruvian artists of great critical relevance who, nevertheless, decided to retire from the art world. What motivates an artist, not to produce art, but to continue producing it, to insist on a creative career that, as his long-standing research on success and failure in the art world suggests, has no end point, but is an endless wandering?

The "ways of disappearing" that Hernández rounds reveal that the hidden face of success is not failure, but burnout, the syndrome of professional exhaustion that, in the field of art, has the particularity of not being associated to an externally imposed workload, nor to the tedium of routine work in an office, nor to the physical exhaustion typical of the tasks in a factory.

Gonzalo Hernández (Lima, Peru, 1991) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work delves into personal narratives related to contemporary dilemmas such as work, success and failure, the art world and identity. As an immigrant, his installation, painting and textile works are very particular from his perspective, while addressing broader cultural associations. Blurring the boundaries between art and life, Hernandez finds truth and meaning in what goes unnoticed, using everyday encounters with text, language and material as fodder for symbolic interpretations.