Discurso cárdeno I, camino de La Rábida, 1992

José Hernandez  

Discurso cárdeno I, camino de La Rábida (Purple Discourse I, Road to La Rábida) is an original etching of 1992 by José Hernández, issued in an edition of 92 copies. It is the first of a pair of plates bearing the title Discurso cárdeno, whose companion shows a ruined baroque church suspended above a cliff, and it shares that print's language of fantastic architecture, meticulous line and vast areas of untouched paper. The reference to La Rábida, the Franciscan monastery near Huelva closely linked to Christopher Columbus, together with the date of 1992, the year of the Fifth Centenary of his first voyage, suggests a meditation on that historical memory. Etching, with its capacity for extremely fine and dense networks of lines, was the ideal medium for Hernández's precise, visionary drawing, in which buildings, organic forms and textiles merge into dreamlike images. José Hernández (Tangier, 1944 – Málaga, 2013) was one of the most personal Spanish artists of the second half of the twentieth century, a painter and printmaker of fantastic, often unsettling imagery, rooted in the tradition of Surrealism and the great masters of the print. The gallery's records indicate that the edition was printed on paper.