Catalogue / artist's book.
With what eyes? is published on the occasion of Rodrigo Hernández's solo exhibition of the same title at the Wattis Institute in San Francisco in 2024. The project takes as its starting point a question posed by Mexican philosopher David M. Peña-Guzmán: "Are humans the only dreamers on Earth?" Reflecting on this thought, Hernández transforms the exhibition space into a shifting landscape of temporary walls and openings that invites us to reconsider how we inhabit and perceive space.
Considering the exhibition format as akin to a dream, Hernández introduces a new body of work that moves between two and three dimensions, between representation and abstraction, the human and the nonhuman. Our attempts to access the inner world of a nonhuman animal—its
Umwelt—meet a conceptual boundary we cannot cross.
This publication expands on the exhibition's themes through contributions by Fernanda Brenner,
Abraham Cruzvillegas, Jeanne Gerrity, David Peña-Guzmán, Julia Mullié, and Diego Villalobos.
Born 1983 in Mexico City, Rodrigo Hernández lives and works between Maastricht and Mexico City. His production is based on drawings, objects and sculptures that are later integrated into installations. The beginning of every project is a rather simple image or idea—for example, the moment when a man finds his reflection on a glass door. From there he develops a research that normally brings him back to three recurrent subjects, here broadly named: surrealism, visual perception and literature. These installations are an attempt to create a space for concentration, or as visual puzzles that trace paths for possible personal narratives.
