Ojo de agua. Or Painting as a Fishing Hook
“With shadow fish and a golden one to starboard
the old fisherman is already heading down the ravine,
a cluster of foam and metal.”
— Ramón Ayala, Pan del Agua
“When you fish you have to be patient. You bait and then you wait.
Desire is the bait that attracts the fish, the ideas.”
— David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish
“The best spot is where the wind hits.”
— Alvarito, The ABC of the Fisherman
How many stories does a lagoon hold? Could they be written upon its waters? Perhaps in the attempt they would dissolve instantly into translucent ripples. Or perhaps an oar from a boat might swirl them forever in ceaseless motion. The truth is, there are those who say that lagoons speak—at least, to those willing to listen. Hernán Salamanco seems to have silently conversed more than once with La Brava Lagoon in Balcarce, Buenos Aires Province, while navigating its waters. And in this, his first solo exhibition at the Herlitzka & Co. gallery, he shares the confidences he has fished there with the hook of his painting.
Hernán is an accomplished painter who has made a name for himself among artists of his generation through work of striking and compelling individuality. The Salamanco style is recognizable from afar. Since the early 2000s, his enamel paintings on repurposed metal sheets have elevated him to the status of an alchemist who ennobles the roughness of a challenging support with his poetic touch. A humble material, molded by other lives, aged always in the open air. Upon these metal signs he splashes his skill, and does not limit himself to brushes. The Salamanco method employs hammers and sanders, ovens and grinders to reclaim and adopt those irregular surfaces where he stages his personal battles. “What has to stay, stays; what has to go, goes,” he declares. He works with great trust in what reemerges from his pictorial layers through an obsessive and uncertain technique that he later seals with almost jewel-like finishes.
There, on those undulating surfaces of liquid appearance, he commands the viscosity of enamel as one might channel a current of water to its destination. He prepares his field of action masterfully—sanding, priming, grounding—then masks with traces of glue and removes them to sow grooves that will later guide, like fine canals, subtle puddles of dye or exuberant streams of paint.
The pop-like appearances of his early series, with their sharp-edged figurations, gave way to countless procedures through which he achieves a broad range of graphic effects. If once he followed from afar the raw pictorial lines of A.R. Penck or Keith Haring—and in some way enriched the local tradition of enamel use seen in Juan Del Prete, Orlando Pierri, or Marcelo Pombo—the script-like markings he now draws connect him to the lineage of Mirtha Dermisache’s illegible writings.
Indeed, upon the fragments of mirrored water he recreates, the dramatic harmony of reeds reveals a strange alphabet. Stems growing, broken, and reflected like letters from a vocabulary whose trajectories of meaning knot us in the reading. It is not the first time Salamanco has turned to nature, but in these lacustrine landscapes he rehearses, for the first time, a watery literature of unutterable tales. His enamel counter-writing bursts into tangled lines upon the mirrored views of skies on earth, where above and below intertwine.
His lines stand before our gaze like taut threads fishing for our thoughts, or like nets capturing our contemplation. Salamanco renews the landscape genre of sunsets and nocturnes by overwriting the hours of the day upon wetlands—a botanical translation of waterlilies of the pampas. Cloudy, nebulous horizons; shadows that approach with memories of storms and floods. The metal sheets, assembled without disguise, calibrate our view—whether distant or near—toward the depth of the place. Venturing into the vastness of the unexplored like Werner Herzog, while meditating daily like David Lynch, the painter holds us within the sublime of an intimate geography.
Ojo de agua is the term used for a lagoon formed by underground rivers that feed it. Painting by painting, Hernán Salamanco—with the meditative patience of a fisherman unafraid of what surfaces from the depths—brings us sensations of a place where one can find calm enough to anchor for a moment. For in times of floods—both real and symbolic—that drown our attention and sink our gaze, it is wise to pause before our own tempests and mental lagoons, as an opportunity to air our ideas, tears, and desires in the sun, or where the wind strikes.
Viviana Usubiaga
PhD in History and Theory of the Arts from the Universidad de Buenos Aires. She is a Researcher at CONICET at the Centro de Investigaciones en Arte y Patrimonio (CIAP) of the Escuela de Arte y Patrimonio at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She teaches at FFyL-UBA, and is a professor at EIDAES-UNSAM.