The Cuban artist Diango Hernández has been living in Düsseldorf since 2006. In his paintings, objects and wall paintings, Hernández unfolds single moments from his biography. His aesthetic vocabulary is shaped by a longing for his lost homeland, its beach, its fruits and its language. Diango Hernández transforms the meandering speeches of Fidel Castro into new visual modes of expression: in his wall paintings, words become waves and waves become a sea of blue symbols. Homeland as an ideological construct and homeland as a place of longing form the two axes of recollection, energy collectors and the perpetuum mobile for Diango Hernández’ artistic production. In one work, the artist brings together small figurative sculptures of Cuban classical modernism collected by his relatives. In another, using simple means, Hernández reconstructs the ground plan of his parent’s house, still the home of his mother.
The title of the exhibition Sobre Las Olas (Over the Waves) embodies the theme of waves threading their way through the presentation in the form of a leitmotif. The title is a direct reference to a waltz composed by the Mexican composer Juventino Rosas (1868–1894), nowadays one of the most well-known compositions from Latin America. At the same time, the theme recreates memories of the special role of the island of Cuba as a midpoint and a last refuge of an ideology, a place of longing, a place of identity and an endless beach.
