My practice takes a critical view of how we as human beings are influenced by the aesthetic language of mass production and the shifting social characterizations in the media that are influenced by political and economical markets. What the media industry creates as reality becomes normalized until it is reality. It is given so much power and can reshape the collective conscience, making us all captives to the content. The sheer amount of data and images being consumed voluntarily and involuntarily on a daily basis is overwhelming. I try to explore my acceptance of being a person who must succumb to this imagery whilst simultaneously trying to challenge this acceptance in my work.
I have been creating large and small scale collages using found and recycled advertisement materials, scrambling the graphics to reroute their content entirely. Using a set of rules whereby I plunder the ads for their colors and shapes— destroying all original messages—I use the remains to produce abstract collages/paintings. In using this set of rules my aim is to remove any sort of agenda in the resulting visuals. In this way I act as a sort of channeler. The remaining shapes are the negative space of the information on this images.

Hernán Rivera Luque was born in Santiago, Chile. Currently live and work in New York

City. His work has recently been shown in exhibitions at PS122 Gallery, NY (2022),

Instituto Cervantes New York, NY (2021), Vitrinalab, Miami (2020), Rainboww Gallery, NY

(2019), Museo del Barrio, NY (2017), Y Gallery, NY (2017), Foundation Hippocrène, Paris

(2016), Die Ecke Gallery, Santiago, Chile (2016), The New School, NY (2014), and Gitana

Rosa Gallery, NY (2012). His work has also been shown at Museo de la Memoria,

Santiago, Chile; La Capella, Barcelona, Spain; Museo de Art Contemporáneo, Santiago,

Chile; and Museo de Arte Precolombino e Indígena, Uruguay