Obsessive boxes, windows that are opened to other worlds where we all inhabit. Indifferent doors that lodge fragments of a being’s universe; apples, arms, hands, feet, heart, clock, reaffirm the reality, everything and nothing; symbolic language impregnated of violence and tenderness. The work of Felipe Herrera is an assemblage where tangible elements are intertwined; paradoxically they come of an imagery hoarded for years in the memory of the man who creates it. Poetics of time, of love, madness and sanity: existential crisis that seizes the emotional language when passing from one time to another. A plummet marks the reason, whereas dry roots of trees without past, fall freely to occupy their own space. The obsession for mystery is the subject. Obsession that defines a presence and absence in the world of visible appearances; it is the game of elements that don’t touch, but that are respected mutually to defend their own existence.
Herrera’s work sends a challenge to artistic conventionalism. In first instance, it breaks dramatically with certain academic disciplines of figurative representation by fragmenting it, whereas it shows an extraordinary perfection in its anatomical drawing. His proposal fuses the mixture of the represented and present figuration that are confronted with each other from extracted elements of a same context, absolutely conceptual exposition that is based on the simultaneous relation of the three-dimensional thing with the two-dimensional thing, the real thing with the imaginary and the visible thing with the non-visible thing. Herrera resolves the idea with boxes or installations, assemblies of elements that associate according to the mathematical relation of the alternate, that which discontinues and the paradoxical thing. The forms, drawn and physical, complement each other in that order, and the logical relationship among them, assuming an unforeseeable character in the visual game when the three-dimensional elements (hands, feet, branches, apples) comprise as part of the flat drawing, an operation centered in the morphologic appearance of the assemblage, and that in formal terms is accepted aesthetically like synthesis of the world of appearances, external and internal, that is of the color, the line and space and of the emotion.
When analyzing, in historical terms, the work that Felipe Herrera has been developing for two decades, its particular foundation is associated to a dialect of discontinuity that relates it to the fragmentation of collage like the artistic phenomenon that revolutionized the pictorial two-dimensionality at the beginning of 20th century, but it arrives at extreme consequences when it doesn’t dematerialize reality, it justifies the ideographic operation which belongs in drawing with the three-dimensional iconic relation; from this dialectic relation, he organizes the surface of the assembly: re-structures the reality to reconstruct it in another format. The work exhibited today portrays part of the coherent and expressive development of the obsessions that torture him, calmed by his intellectual thoughts, symbolic and emotional. Felipe Herrera, artist of present times, has nourished himself of the universal arts poetics and the wealth of life.
Bélgica Rodríguez
Caracas, February 2008