Dominique Porter Gallery is pleased to present Stalking the Wild Pendulum, a solo exhibition of work by Oakland-based artist Ramiro Hernandez.

Commingling concepts from disparate schools of thought—from Neoplatonism to the military industrial complex— Hernandez grapples with difficult topics, depicting them with a hazy soft focus and technicolor glow. Fusing the particular faded palette that Los Angelenos would recognize in sun-bleached paint or a smoggy sunset with a particular fuzzy sublime reminiscent of Gerhard Richter, Hernandez gives his viewer both respite from the world’s brutality. If one looks closely, however, the artist also offers a channel through which to ruminate on this same ineffable range of human capability—its cruelty and its beauty.

This exhibition takes its title from the book Stalking the Wild Pendulum, on the Mechanics of Consciousness by Itzhak Bentov. In the book, in order to explain the model behind holograms, Bentov gives the example of pebbles thrown into the water. The splash will appear chaotic to the naked eye, yet every ripple can mechanically, through mathematics, be traced back to the source. If you freeze that ripple and shine a light through it, that is a hologram. If one were to drop that frozen sheet of rippled ice, every shard, every square inch of the water would contain the main event. “The tiny shard contains the whole picture,” Hernandez says. “It may be a little fuzzy, a little less data, less aperture, but the whole is contained in the part.”

This theory of the hologram evokes a visual, which is very much present in Hernandez’s misty-rainbow works. Transgression, an idea that the artist associates with the author’s life and untimely death, is also present in works

depicting weaponry and machinery used in military or police activities. The casual horrors are, however, hung next to other vignettes with more calm imagery such as a day at the beach. “The Pendulum in the book is reality. It swings between the particle, the finite, the material world, and the infinite, the unknown, the void” says Hernandez.

Hernandez is also keenly aware of art history, and narrative moments of shift in the evolution of painting also influence his style. “Impressionists sought to capture what the machines could not. One step further, while the Impressionists were out in the fields painting against the moving sun, Picabia was in his studio painting Impressionist landscapes from found postcards. From the beginning the machine was in his work,” the artist says. The principles of fine art are thus, in Hernandez’s credo, not untethered from machinery just as mysticism and conflict might not be. The artist catches these images and concepts under the umbrella of his own fact finding, uniting them in his technicolor paintings.