The Failure Fiber Artist Corporation (F.F.A. Corp) presents its newest member, Gonzalo Hernandez with an exhibition of recent work at The Hen House in Savannah, GA. This artist has been inducted to this organization with the completion of recent works titled, “the almost pattern paintings” and “me as textile”.

This series announces the return of the artist to the medium of painting after years apart. Paradoxically using painting to create works about textiles, these paintings are small-scale recreations of well-known pattern. Houndstooth, Gingham and Burberry all make appearances. These paintings are adequate entries for the F.F.A. Corp. because of their insufficiencies. These paintings are heavily-handled, loose recreations of famous patterns giving these normally rigid designs a characteristic loose and liquid appearance. The labor of the process for these paintings is at once prevalent but insufficient, presenting a recreation but an inaccurate one at that. Yet, the small scale of these works implies that they are samples of these patterns intended to be used as reference making the compilation of them into a swatch book of almost pattern paintings. Normally used as standards for a pattern and design, these almost patterns present a book of standards, but this standard is mediocre at best. However, failure and success are determined by metrics; metrics which can be changed. By setting the standard of “almost”, these paintings are now cornerstones of the new standard. This show is full of failures and that is why it is so successful.

These almost patterns are accompanied by a series of works titled “me as textile”. In these photographs, the artist becomes a part of the textiles he examines by cutting a face-shaped hole in a roughly-stitched patterned cloth. Despite his central appearance in the cloth, the artist is not the subject of the work, rather he is the direct object. The focus of the textile is the repeating pattern across its surface and since the face is the only visible part of the artist’s body within the textile it reduces the artist to only his most recognizable features. The cloth reduces the artist to a pattern. Given the artist’s role as pattern within each of the works in the exhibition, the question arises: is it a successful or failed pattern?

Instagram: @hernandezgonzalo