Untitled (Abstraction on lead)

Lead keeps. It keeps the light it does not give back, keeps whatever is entrusted to it and makes it slow. Metal of the alchemists and of the boxes that hold what must not get out, it weighs in the hand and in the gaze. Sergio Hernández has worked it for years as one works a difficult land, and in this piece of 2014 he turns it into the ground of a village.

On the metal, scratched rather than painted, a few huts rise: gabled roofs, walls of a single stroke, a street barely hinted at between them. Colour enters through the cracks, reds of roof tile and dried blood, blues of a freshly painted door, ochres of adobe, and stays there, drunk in by the surface, as water enters a stone. It could be a hamlet in the Mixteca at midday, the sun bleaching the walls, or its memory after many downpours: the wall that survives, the stain that was a house, the line that was a road.

The painter draws with the point, as one writes in a codex, and lets the lead supply the silence. From there comes the strange serenity of the work: the village seems inscribed rather than depicted, engraved in a matter that does not forget. The incisions recall the script of the old painted books; the stains, the memory of rain on gravestones. One would say the work was found rather than made.

Seen up close, the surface reveals its craft: layers that are scraped back, glazes that are lifted off, a metal that accepts colour reluctantly and returns it subdued, as if seen through time. It is painting understood as geology: each stratum tells an age, and the village that finally emerges is what remains when everything else has gone.