The exhibit hall in Blanca de Navarra 9 with its six-meter ceilings provides ample space for the placement of three large-scale black pieces that explore Herminio’s line of research. They invite the viewer to consider not only the splendidness of volume, but also the categories of uncertainty and instability that these solid and well-defined objects surprisingly generate.
Notable among the works displayed in Blanca de Navarra 7 is a selection featuring the recurring presence of a mirror. This opens up the viewer’s field of experience and prompts a dialogue with both real space—where the viewer and the work of art are immersed—and virtual space. Also on exhibit are works where Herminio avails himself of basic geometric shapes to support delicate elements enigmatically held aloft by magnetic fields.
Herminio works with elemental shapes and basic colors common to suprematism. Suprematism also is manifest in the artist’s frequent use of diagonal lines meant to suggest a sense of instability. However, the artist adds a magnetic field as counterweight, which in turn presents the work to the viewer as an implausible object. Thus the viewer’s experience before the monumentality of these three pieces exhibited in Blanca de Navarra 9 exemplifies suprematism: the unmediated encounter with a work of art.
In Donald Judd’s words: “The quality of a work of art is reliant on its most visual elements: color, surface, proportion, and structure. The clearer and more dominant these are, the clearer and more dominant the quality of the work.”
– Donald Judd, Abstract Expressionism, 1983.
