Exhibition/event has ended.
Rodrigo Hernández "Fish"
Nonaka-Hill, Kyoto
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Artists
Rodrigo Hernández
Nonaka-Hill Kyoto is pleased to present Fish, an exhibition of new works by Mexican artist Rodrigo Hernández. Using a distinctive visual lexicon based on idealization, flatness, and abbreviated line—akin to the building blocks of Japanese aesthetics—Hernández intertwines drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation into an immersive and contemplative experience. Making works in wood, metal, and paper, he lures us into a realm of iconic images drawn from a matrix of personal invention, art history, and the natural world, estranging them through a dream-like atmosphere. In his first exhibition in Japan, the resulting effects of dislocation and somnambulance are used in the service of investigating broader questions about representing the immaterial and fugitive nature of time and place.
Hernández sees time as an entity comprised of many parts that coincide into a greater mechanism, akin to a clock. It is only when the patterns of nature are “paired” do they create a sense of temporality. In Ancient Egypt, the advent of timekeeping was facilitated by connecting the Nile’s flooding cycle with the appearance of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. Analogously, Hernández creates environments in which his images and objects are arranged in space without hierarchy, but invites the viewer to connect patterns in these works in order to make meaning, which, in turn, gives time its shape. As such, it is not a project based in linearity and logic, but through holonomic experience—a way through which the viewer (and artist) can move freely in any direction without re-orienting herself towards a predetermined destination; it is where meaning dissolves and manifests interchangeably.
Hernández’s oil painting on panel, Time is a Fish, 2026, functions as an index of the exhibition and his ongoing preoccupations: It depicts a bear and fish frozen in a mutual gaze over fizzy water, a cycle of three triangulated elements. A key example of the Japanese pictorial Zen Buddhist tradition, The Gourd and the Catfish, ca. 1413, a quasi-koan painting by Josetsu (active ca. 1405–23) (now in the collection of the Taizōin in the Kyoto Zen monastery of Myōshinji) is an entry point into Hernández’s process. In it, one sees a landscape whose foreground offers a peasant; he is standing by a river holding a gourd, eyeing a catfish. Using an inappropriate instrument for the hunting of fish, the painting alludes to a ludic impossibility (the koan) as well as to the futility of reason to “capture” Zen. In his painting of the bear and fish, Hernández offers us a more plausible scenario, yet locks both animals into eternal equipoise: the effect is less about objects of desire than about (re)finding the meaning they contain—fugitive and elusive—like the idea of time itself. Mimicking the dual function of Josetsu’s painting—a metaphor for reality and a screen to partition and direct viewers in space—Hernández’s painting nods to other images and objects of the installation as empty containers of meaning suspended in time.
Hernández’s large drawings on paper, for example, denote actions he has not yet taken or might never be taken: they are life-size preparatory “models” for possible hand-hammered. As such, they suggest an immaterial world of ideas in their nascent state. For him, drawing serves to make contact with elemental sensory data before their settlement into memory. His transformations into metal pull the information in his drawings from one dimension into another, while retaining their archetypal appearance, having been culled from the collective unconscious.
In Hernández’s vision, representation is reduced to its most elemental state, stripped of its culturally-specific meanings. In the process, we are confronted with forms that loosely resemble Japanese and Mexican art—traditions that prioritize simplification, elegance, and flatness—while remaining free from either. His art, while emerging from sensory information harvested from his upbringing in Mexico and his travels, pierces behind the cultural markers into a more archaic dimension, one that underwrites humanity’s dreams and blurs the boundary between sleeping and waking states in both the artist and viewer.
Hernández sees time as an entity comprised of many parts that coincide into a greater mechanism, akin to a clock. It is only when the patterns of nature are “paired” do they create a sense of temporality. In Ancient Egypt, the advent of timekeeping was facilitated by connecting the Nile’s flooding cycle with the appearance of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky. Analogously, Hernández creates environments in which his images and objects are arranged in space without hierarchy, but invites the viewer to connect patterns in these works in order to make meaning, which, in turn, gives time its shape. As such, it is not a project based in linearity and logic, but through holonomic experience—a way through which the viewer (and artist) can move freely in any direction without re-orienting herself towards a predetermined destination; it is where meaning dissolves and manifests interchangeably.
Hernández’s oil painting on panel, Time is a Fish, 2026, functions as an index of the exhibition and his ongoing preoccupations: It depicts a bear and fish frozen in a mutual gaze over fizzy water, a cycle of three triangulated elements. A key example of the Japanese pictorial Zen Buddhist tradition, The Gourd and the Catfish, ca. 1413, a quasi-koan painting by Josetsu (active ca. 1405–23) (now in the collection of the Taizōin in the Kyoto Zen monastery of Myōshinji) is an entry point into Hernández’s process. In it, one sees a landscape whose foreground offers a peasant; he is standing by a river holding a gourd, eyeing a catfish. Using an inappropriate instrument for the hunting of fish, the painting alludes to a ludic impossibility (the koan) as well as to the futility of reason to “capture” Zen. In his painting of the bear and fish, Hernández offers us a more plausible scenario, yet locks both animals into eternal equipoise: the effect is less about objects of desire than about (re)finding the meaning they contain—fugitive and elusive—like the idea of time itself. Mimicking the dual function of Josetsu’s painting—a metaphor for reality and a screen to partition and direct viewers in space—Hernández’s painting nods to other images and objects of the installation as empty containers of meaning suspended in time.
Hernández’s large drawings on paper, for example, denote actions he has not yet taken or might never be taken: they are life-size preparatory “models” for possible hand-hammered. As such, they suggest an immaterial world of ideas in their nascent state. For him, drawing serves to make contact with elemental sensory data before their settlement into memory. His transformations into metal pull the information in his drawings from one dimension into another, while retaining their archetypal appearance, having been culled from the collective unconscious.
In Hernández’s vision, representation is reduced to its most elemental state, stripped of its culturally-specific meanings. In the process, we are confronted with forms that loosely resemble Japanese and Mexican art—traditions that prioritize simplification, elegance, and flatness—while remaining free from either. His art, while emerging from sensory information harvested from his upbringing in Mexico and his travels, pierces behind the cultural markers into a more archaic dimension, one that underwrites humanity’s dreams and blurs the boundary between sleeping and waking states in both the artist and viewer.
Schedule | Mar 14 (Sat) 2026-Apr 25 (Sat) 2026 Opening Hours Information
Opening Reception Mar 14 (Sat) 2026 15:00 - 18:00 | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fee | Free | ||||
| Website | https://www.nonaka-hill.com/exhibitions/90-rodrigo-hernandez-fish/ | ||||
| Venue | Nonaka-Hill, Kyoto https://www.nonaka-hill.com/ | ||||
| Location | 201-4 Nishino-Cho, Shinmonzen-Dori, Higashiyama-Ku, Kyoto 605-0088 | ||||
| Access | 3 minute walk from exit 2 at Sanjo Station on the Keihan line, 4 minute walk from exit 9 at Gion-shijo Station on the Keihan line, 6 minute walk from exit 2 at Sanjo Keihan Station on the Tozai subway line, 8 minute walk from exit 1A at Kyoto-kawaramachi Station on the Hankyu line. | ||||
| Related images | Click on the image to enlarge it  |
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