IBAI HERNANDORENA

IBAI HERNANDORENA by JULIE CRENN

Source : Documents d'artistes Nouvelle-Aquitaine dd/a The city, its landscapes, its architecture and its temporalities are at the heart of Ibai Hernandorena's artistic thinking. He is particularly interested in the notion of modernity, the utopias it engenders and the way they have faded through the ages. Utopias that, over the decades, collapse, evolve or renew themselves. For example, he directed Promise (2014), a monumental house of cards formed from façade elements designed by Jean Prouvé. The sculpture seems both heavy and fragile.
Between construction and deconstruction, the idea of modernity hangs by a thread, and can waver at any moment. In this sense, the artist works with the ghosts of cities and buildings. For example, he articulates steel modules that form a Landscape (2015), which changes and adapts to the exhibition space. It is the image of an architectural view from which he has soberly extracted the drawing. Similarly, the photograph entitled Slide shows a building in the process of being demolished. The building, of which only the skeleton remains, appears to be a cardboard model, fragile and ephemeral. The image is blurred, the colours accentuated and out of sync. Our vision is disturbed, and the image of the disappearing building becomes persistent. In Spain, Ibai Hernandorena films a ghost town, Seseña, south of Madrid (Falls - 2015).
After the 2008 property crisis, the city is still a work in progress, barely inhabited, barely activated. In his car, he films around a roundabout, the image exaggeratedly slowed down. The tracking shot seems infinite. The landscape is blurred, elusive, evanescent. It's a sensation we find again in the series Destinations (2015), in which the artist burns postcards of the Grands Ensembles built between the 1950s and 1970s onto sheets of paper. The signs of modernity, and by extension of a collective utopia, are slowly fading away. In the course of his work, Ibai Hernandorena explores the notion of movement by establishing different translations: physical, mental, material and visual. For example, he moulds the upper part of his motorbike in translucent resin. The shell of the fairing is then placed on a steel element fixed to the wall. The object alludes to the motorbike and all that it implies, recalling Boccioni's futuristic sculptures that convey the idea of movement. To the mechanical dimension, Ibai Hernandorena adds an organic dimension: the work also refers to a chrysalis, a strange body in gestation. The series Timeline (2015) is made up of images taken from aircraft. Between the earth and the sky, the images speak of movement, lack and injury. The camera seems incapable of capturing the changing state of a landscape in motion. Time is slowed down, suspended, slowly consumed. By exploring an uncomfortable, elusive zone, the artist works with time, ruins and the memory of a landscape, a town or a house. In the course of his work, everything that seems familiar escapes us and is transformed.