Jan Hendrix, «The natural frame».»

Evento pasado

From March 25th to June 10th, an exhibition featuring the latest works of conceptual graphic artist Jan Hendrix (Maasbree, Holland 1949), described as a “universal creator,” can be visited at the Foundation's headquarters in Cerezales del Condado.

Renowned artist and deserving of prestigious awards such as the National Engraving Award of the Royal Academy of San Fernando (2008) or the Order of the Aztec Eagle The life of Jan Hendrix, as documented by the Mexican Government, has been that of a traveller, an explorer who has journeyed through and recorded, in his own way, the places he has passed through.

Their projects stand out due to research, and his collaboration with Nobel laureates in Literature such as Gabriel García Márquez and Seamus Heaney in the edition of author's books.
In his graphic work, he resorts to an element common to all the places he travels to, focusing his attention on the vegetation, plants, and trees that give each territory its own identity, but which, at the same time, are a symbol of the global.

Thus, this exhibition brings together two of the Foundation's three fundamental avenues of action: ethno-education and visual arts, as the selected works utilise and value the territory and its natural wealth, represented by plant diversity, elevating it to an artistic object.

These works, along with supporting documentation in the form of texts and videos with biographical connotations, aim to introduce the viewer to Hendrix's creative world, through his most recent output and following a narrative path that also seeks to explain his technical creative processes, which in this case are as important as the finished work.

Following his own working guidelines, the exhibition leads us from the general to the particular, from the raw landscapes of the “Malpaís” series to the ultimate simplification and stylisation of the plant element represented in the pods and seeds of “After Nature”, passing through an intermediate viewpoint in which his works faithfully depict trees and plants. If Jan Hendrix's work is characterised by anything, it is his continuous technical research in the field of graphic work, a merit for which he received the Royal Academy of San Fernando prize in 2008 for innovation and contributions to the graphic arts.

In this regard, Hendrix produces without setting any limits other than his own material and spatial resources, meaning that the supports can vary, using anything from the architectural space itself to Nepalese paper, enamelled metal, cut metal, bronze, or Corian.

This important characteristic of his work is evident in the exhibition where, as a result of the recent temporal scope it covers, the media are varied, from traditional watercolours on paper and ceramic enamels on metal, to more innovative approaches such as irregular and sometimes tortuous shapes of cut metal or bronze. These pieces, by their very morphology, being entirely cut-out, integrate the exhibition space itself as their support, the plane onto which the shadows are cast, thus completing the work.

Beneath all this material variation, one can sense intense workshop labour, experimentation, and fascination with industrial processes that imply constant.