Chrystal Gayle
October 17, 2025
Blog Post Entry Assignment
Rodrigo Hernández’s first exhibition at ChertLüdde Gallery offers a focused, poetic journey through material, myth, and memory. Known for working across painting, relief, sculpture, and installation, Hernández builds what he calls a “personal constellation of images,” a title borrowed from a poem by Bernadette Mayer. It captures the show’s drifting, dreamlike rhythm, where meanings shift and overlap.
Walking through the exhibition felt like entering a space where restraint and imagination meet. Many works shimmered with subtle gold tones that gave them an ancient yet refreshing presence. In one piece, a small brass figure emerges from a hammered surface. Its tiny scale and smooth, continuous curves create a feeling of vulnerability and quiet reflection, as if the form is caught in a moment of inner stillness.
Another relief, also in gold tones, leans toward an architectural composition. Layered planes create rhythm through repetition, while tight spacing introduces a sense of containment. At the bottom, a lone human figure walks beneath the towering shapes. The contrast in scale makes the work read like a meditation on how individuals move through memory or history, navigating structures far larger than themselves.
Hernández’s careful layering gives the exhibition a cinematic quality, as if time unfolds through overlapping images rather than a straight line.
I really enjoyed your reflection. It feels gentle, observant, and beautifully attuned to the quiet details in Hernández’s work. Your descriptions of the gold tones and shifting scales create a calm, poetic atmosphere. I think if you’d like to push it a bit further, you could add one or two sentences about your personal response, like how the works made you feel as you moved through the space. It would give your already thoughtful writing a more intimate layer.
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