José Antonio Hernández-Diez
Ka.Be. Contemporary. Miami
The most recent solo show of the renowned Venezuelan artist José Antonio Hernández-Diez (Caracas, 1964) is the point of departure for a work in progress he has titled Petare 2009. Featured as a great photographic installation accompanied by a brief text excerpted from the novel by H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895) which provides a key to facilitate its reading, the exhibition potentiates the signs of the complex interaction established between Hernández-Diez and a group of inhabitants of the mentioned Caracas neighborhood, based on a methodology which might be briefly described as follows:
A model of a DeLorean DMC-12 sports car, which was internationally identified as a time machine after its utilization as such in the film by Robert Zemeckis (1985), Back to the Future, is parked in a street in the densely populated Petare neighborhood; the outer part of the car trunk is decorated with an arrangement of lively and abundant local plants, evidently a contextualized reference, not devoid of humor, to the two flowers that the Traveler in Wells’s work brings back from the future as a testimony of the fact that gratitude and tenderness will continue to inhabit man’s heart; people of different ages are invited to have their picture taken in the car, a situation that opens, in situ, the possibility for verbal exchange regard- ing the reasons for their possible trip through time and the importance of this trip in their lives.
The proposal is anchored in the connection Hernández-Diez establishes with the abovementioned sci-fi artistic productions, both of them popularity phenomena which besides transiting swiftly from the cultural industry to the so-called high culture have successfully remained in the memory of wide sectors of the audience thanks to their exploration of human sensibility through a fantasy; an issue that is at the very core of the new artistic situation generated by Hernández-Diez. The artist now invites us to witness his work process, a performative play in which the exhibition constitutes a first phase by coming to a stop just before we are able to become acquainted with the per- sonal stories that the protagonists of the action weave around the time machine and their own hunger for mobility: towards the future, as Wells would conceive it, or towards the past, as preferred by Gale y Zemeckis.
The apparently bizarre gesture of taking a cult technological “contraption” like the DeLorean to a poor Caracas neighbor- hood functions in this proposal, among other things, as a resonating metaphor regarding intercultural communication and the decentralization of the site of construction of the fantasy of the journey through time, historically linked to the countries with the greatest scientific-technological development. Likewise, we may also suppose that this fantasy, too, becomes diversified and is reelaborated in multiple directions by those common citizens who, turned into actors participants, become involved in the performance developed by Hernández-Diez. There must always be a destination place and date from where the experience of such a journey may be narrated, and in this case, it is Petare 2009.
