This work by Ricardo Hernandez constitutes a project that differs from his career so far, in the perspective of betting strongly to establish a proposal, through audiovisual installation, that contains in a virtual way, a selective presence of works corresponding to his primal pictorial work carried out at the end of the 90s and the beginning of 2000, in an act of intermingling with stories and events of the red press in the port city of Valparaíso, Chile.

Those pictorial works correspond to night visions of their city of origin and will now become the background for scenarios of criminal events.

This assembly operation shows the coincidences chained one by one between the painted urban landscapes and the press releases, obtained in an obsessive task of gathering, loaded with omens, which will progressively generate the installation of a hybrid narrative structure, between the fiction and reality, which will give foundation to the concept of premonitory fiction. These initial works with a certain naïve bias, will then be faced with the violent shock of crimes loaded with the obscene account of sensational horror.

For the event, the artist replaces the painting in person and materially. Those records and notes will be poured into a \”book of minutes\” or text-collage, which is constituted parodically in the object of the autopsy, as a body built from fragments, in a Frankestein’s appointment. It is a codex that collects, builds and deconstructs periodically with all kinds of medical notes, clippings, consumer tickets, bus tickets, photographs, etc., as well as thoughts, emotions and experiences put in writing, as if it were an instrumental script, complementary to the short film shown.

It is at this point that the short film acquires a fundamental relevance in its condition of audiovisual setup, since it places us in this natural amphitheater with the show of the corpse at the center.
This production synthesizes -in a narrative and atmospheric structure- the spots, leaks and rain, street brightness and dull light, insomnia and landscape, premonitory nightmares and documented encounters, the search for certain crime patterns in this real puzzle of reality, contravening the linear conventions of a conventional audiovisual narrative, by superimposing the strata and friction between painting and criminal accounts.

It is in this context of tension, that the artist plays and bets with the cabalistic fiction of six videos displayed on six tablets, accompanied by analogical journal sheets to the image, establishing the construction of stories that locate the facts on the scale of the city.

The Fourth Wall is the artist\’s interpellation to the public that, subject to the constant bombardment of an infinite production of images in the hypnotic logic of global cultural capitalism (* 1), makes an indolent auditorium from them when facing tragic events and the human suffering In this way, it invites the viewer to join the work as an active protagonist, whose main value lies in giving a “public account” of a complex autobiographical experience, assumed as a witness of acts of violence and crime.

In this way, he constructs a coherent and self-reflective work discourse, composed of a plot rhetoric formalized into a conceptual aesthetic bet, becoming a kind of construct, which can only be expressed with the critical exercise of parody and metaphor.

Finally, the author constructs a revealing “picture” as a diagram, substituting pictorial works for digital image devices, intentionally provoking a critical reflection on speculation in the commercial transaction of works of art, as well as on the contemporary validity of the artist.

(* 1) Sontag Susan,
In photography, 1975