From the objects that make up the contemporary world, money has a hierarchical connotation. Its existence forges in man a terrible anxiety, to such extent that it breaks will. Its depersonalized entity becomes omnipotent and generates more than a myth after its power. Humankind thinks about it as means of support, vital dream, goal, elemental substance for proper development of human existence. However, no one stops to think that its presence is the result of our efforts to control and organize community life that its eminent condition precedes ours. Definitely, as every cultural construction of man, it is a text of undeniable importance, whose empire is the result of human weakness.
In his most recent exhibition in Galería Habana, entitled S.O.S. Yunier Hernández takes again the highly symbolic purpose of money and even recreates it endlessly from a pseudo-conceptualist lexicon. Excessive literalism and overabundance distinguish his unfortunate speech. He manages again and again to make the money, regardless of its form whether coin, bill, or inaccurate reproduction of iconographic features that are immanent in an empty reflection. He provides its exhaustion as well as subject and limits it, changing it into a closed system, lacking of connections to the outside world. It is money and its concomitant universe, platitudes are recreated without hesitation. There is not throughout this display a gesture of displacement of direction, an interference, not even a break in the string of signifiers that entangles after money. He does not work in the order to the pragmatic speech for the production of new areas of knowledge about it. He is so methodical as well as his impetus is elemental. When, he inserts the voracity and vastness of an open sea, the futility of a mirage of soap bubbles, the essential character of the basic organs of the human being, the septic image of a culture of microorganisms, or the pressing and ephemeral nature of time, he merely exceeds the assimilative capacity of a glass already waterlogged with notes of not effective poetry at all.
In short, Hernández has missed the selected path and has misunderstood the instrumental turn proposed by conceptualism and that forms the backbone of much of the contemporary artistic creation. It is worse, he looks in his wiles to find the tools for affirmative poetry without doubt. It is worth remembering that the conceptualism is eminently deconstructive, sectarian, seditious, perceptive, gullible and no evidence is allowed, if many doubts.
We must remember that the origin of conceptualism legitimized art as an autonomous entity enough to undertake on its own a philosophical re-visitation of the existence and daily experience. Joseph Kosuth, founder of the movement, classified it as a successful opportunity for the consideration of the nature of art. This encouraged, at the height of post-structuralism, to be applied to the field of reflection on global culture. Today, the notion of art as an idea, as information, as speech and narration, has been overtaken by commissioning extensive practice at all levels of cultural life, of an eminently skeptical perspective. The artist and theorist Douglas Huebler summarized, speaking of his own work, the basic meaning of this cultural impulse: “The world is full of more or less interesting objects; I do not want to add any other; I prefer to simply state the existence of things (…).”
In short, conceptualism presupposes for its effectiveness according to the artistic strategy a violent act of mental generation in its remoteness from sensible impressions, conventions assumed as noble and just, and sick of explored representations. Finally, it involves the raising of any particular expression to a universal significance thought. Its carnivalization, however, hurts the man and his ability of recreating reality at his side. Let aside the pretentious and inert mimesis and risk your life in a doubt. Make your empire, the eternal rest of the word itself.
It is impossible to determine at this point if Hernández has consciously used the name which has presented his latest work with. Anyway, it is valid to remember that just that sign, symbolizing a request for Help was proffered by Senator Tullius Cimber after his first strike of death to the dictator Julius Caesar, back in the Ides of March, 44 B.C.; and the rest of his partners helped him, according to the call, at the process of assassination. Now, well how do you want your call to be supported?
–Luis Enrique Padrón