Perception, value and productivity constitute the central axis of Albano Hernandez’s work. His practice explores and challenges the medium of painting through disparate disciplines such as the meat industry, asceticism and the politics of art production. He was raised in Ávila, a Spanish region where eating meat forms an important cultural phenomenon and where the meat industry plays a significant role in the region’s economy. The aesthetics that meat generates as a commodity is therefore a major focus of Albano’s work. He is particularly interested in processes of fragmentation, packing, distribution and exposure of animal bodies under meat labels, and the simulacrum of fake meat.
"Concerns of materiality and corporeality pervade Albano Hernández’s minimal and sophisticated, sculptural paintings. They are constructed from rows of repeated, thin, ceramic, lozenge-shaped forms, which are, surprisingly, slices of thick brushstrokes of air-dry clay cut up by the artist with an electric food slicer. Hernández has long been interested in the meat industry and its processing, packing and commodification of flesh. Here the artist’s physical metaphor wryly extends that industrial logic to art itself".
Excerpt from Field of Difference, an essay by Nick Hackworth