Ricardo Miguel

Hernández

Ricardo Miguel Hernández is a cultural archivist and visual curator who explores nostalgia through the manipulation of landscapes and portraits. Utilizing collage, he seamlessly blends cultures and identities to create narratives that highlight the ephemeral nature of memories. By bringing lost or forgotten memories to the forefront, he encourages viewers to reflect on their own experiences and the cyclical nature of history. His work serves as a reminder of the importance of preserving cultural heritage and the emotional power of the past.

Collage works for me as a kind of therapeutic medium where I return all my fears and frustrations, but also desires and hopes. Each act of hitting is a gesture of protest and therefore a gesture of liberation.

Ricardo Miguel Hernández

When the memory turns to dust, for me as an artist it is a reflective process in which I combine empirical, psychological and critical things. I conceive the random gesture between the selection of a certain photographic document and the preconception in invoice of different stories, as a rescue practice where the apparently disposable, old or residual bear the weight of a memory that is presented to me as a pretext to recontextualize and resemantize the frozen story on photographic paper. I appropriate myself of a found testimony that covers the twenties to the eighties of the last century; I archive it, classify it and transmute it into a new metaphor.

Ricardo Miguel Hernández

I conscientiously manipulate, meticulously elaborate other realities, juxtaposed, assembled, mutilated, where I do not intend to disguise the traces of time on paper, nor the seams resulting from these photo collages. I consider myself as a restless prowler, a visual archaeologist who operates technically and discursively on elasticity of a record of reality; an original story that I reactivate through the conception of an aesthetic ontology that encompasses the ideological, the social, the political, the religious, the familiar…

This Series is a kind of built and resurrected testament in which meanings and mixtures of a culture such as the Cuban one, of mixed race and singular are distilled, which delights even today in nostalgia and sustenance of an astonishing and worn out ideal. I assemble landscapes, portraits, customs scenes or abstracts motifs to reformulate that individual/social memory; to enrich that heritage many times found within a Cuban family; and to offer a possible interstice that reminds us of who we are and how we see ourselves from the contemporary artistic debate.

Ricardo Miguel Hernández

Ricardo Miguel Hernández was born in 1984 in Havana, Cuba, where he still lives today.