Ambivalence and ambiguity are two pervasive characteristics in the work of Rodrigo Hernández (Mexico City, 1983). Almost everything in his universe oscillates between states, as if comfortably inhabiting transience. Between drawing, painting, mural, sculpture and installation, his works deliberately seek miscegenation or contamination between disciplines. On the other hand, the interests these works put forth are also far from univocal or linear. In his universe, art and craft, high culture and popular expression, the past and the contemporary, the private and the political, the narrative and the elliptical coexist and strengthen one another, in a logic which dispenses with hierarchies and makes the law of attraction the only rule of the game.

The exhibition Rodrigo Hernández brings to Culturgest Porto bears witness to this. Moon Foulard is the result of the confluence of a broad set of the artist’s interests, made to revolve around a tutelary figure: the Italian stylist Emilio Pucci. Notorious for the revolutionary way he imagined the use of prints in ready-to-wear haute couture, Pucci was a pioneer in combining the use of light, stretch fabrics with garishly coloured geometric compositions. The iconographic context of the exhibition begins and ends with Pucci, but its ideological scope is considerably broader. In fact, it is part of a long-standing debate about the place of aesthetic expression in artistic production – a dispute about the role that taste, style, form, the ornament, and, ultimately, the pursuit of pleasure, can still play in contemporary society.