Luis Alberto Hernández (Venezuela, 1950) lives and works between Germany, France and Venezuela. In 1971 he began his art studies at the Centro Francisco Pimentel in Caracas; then he continued at the Escuela de Artes Visuales Cristóbal Rojas, Caracas, and at the Centro de Enseñanza Gráfica (CEGRA), in Caracas, Venezuela. To theoretically complement his practical studies, he entered the School of Arts of the Universidad Central de Venezuela. He also took a course in Theology for Religious at the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello, in Caracas.

“I have gathered fragments of a prodigious heritage in order to give rise to the poetics of the sacred, which is the basis of my artistic proposal,” said Luis Alberto Hernandez, who has certainly dedicated his life to the mystery of the sacred, contained in the magical and the religious, that which has concerned and accompanied man in his different eras, civilizations and cultures of the world. The idea of the sacred is the source of inspiration for his visual work. It has been a constant, obsessive theme for years, so much so that one could think that in all his production Hernández has worked on a single work, which he composes, decomposes and recomposes in its multiple formal and symbolic possibilities.

His visual discourse is made up of stains and strokes of color -black, red, white, blue, ocher-, gold leaf, ancient writings, calligraphy, religious signs and symbols of the Eastern and Western world, such as the Star of David, crosses, mandalas, triangles, circles, and squares, elements to which the artist imprints a high content of plasticity, which generates a great visual impact on the viewer, thus clearing the high symbolic content of the work, which usually ends up being indecipherable, abstract, for many. In it, art, symbolism, religion and linguistics merge.

Stylistically, the painting of this artist can be placed in informalism, particularly that tendency that practices gestuality, the use of signs, ideograms and calligraphy. In short, the work of Hernández is conceived on the basis of a very personal philosophy.

José Gregorio Noroño