Solo presentation by Puerto Rican artist Ricardo Morales-Hernández at East Hampton Shed, New York



East Hampton Shed is pleased to announce This. The history of a lover blue as the sky never shy, the first U.S. solo presentation by Ricardo Morales-Hernández.


The process in which Ricardo Morales-Hernández formulates his canvases is both intuitive and rigorous. The attention shown to a somewhat harsh array of materials melds readily with his fluid and lyrical strokes. The presented series of works float ambiguously through abstraction between a figure and landscape. The resulting images are emotionally jarring, but beautiful at once. Morales-Hernández’s channeling of the anti-rational, typical of historical landscape paintings, is married with a diverse range of material considerations. Terming the series “compost paintings”, the surfaces are layered and collaged with materials from his archives, dating from 2009 to the present, some of which were components of former, dismantled works, and some collected from the surrounding tropical environment. The substantial amount of layering results is a form of reverse archaeology constituting a “reflection of emotional and spiritual status, compressed as a summary”. This summary, memory made physical, is epitomized in the color blue, yet counterpointed by its source. The blue comes from construction chalk, used for snap lining, temporarily gridding out physical surfaces. The works coalesce in the absurdity of attempting to take architectonic measurements of emotional states.

Image by Ricardo Morales-Hernández 

Image by Ricardo Morales-Hernández 

Morales-Hernández’s omnivorous approach to materials and technique is an embodiment of the political and cultural status of the Puerto Rican colony, where crisis and often struggle manifest itself in the form of acquisition and survival. His musical graphism and botanical oriented drawings are almost fueled by his memories and the grammar of landscape, literally using sticks and stones, artist made charcoal, sand, stitches, collage, and construction chalk employed in additive and subtractive process mirroring the scalability of memory and sentiment.

Image by Ricardo Morales-Hernández 

Ricardo Morales-Hernández (b. 1980) lives and works in San Juan, PR. His work has been the subject of solo presentations at Walter Otero, San Juan, PR; Unpainted, Munich, DE; and La Productora, San Juan, PR. He has been included in group exhibitions at Museo San Juan, PR; Manifiesto Composta-LAB, PR, Peripher, Zurich, CH; The Center of Photography at Woodstock, NY; and MUAC, PR


Exhibition:  This. The history of a lover blue as the sky never shy featuring works by Ricardo Morales-Hernández runs through October 3rd 2016 at East Hampton Shed 30 Blue Jay Way, East Hampton, New York 11937 / Gallery Hours: By Appointment Only / Information: 631-741-8462 / easthamptonshed@gmail.com

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