Jhonnatan Hernandez

Al Borde del Vacio (2026)

Painting

18 x 24 x 1.5 in.

Artist Bio

Jhonnatan Hernandez is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary Mexican artist, designer, and creative strategist working across painting, drawing, photography, print, writing, music, and design. His practice moves through abstraction, language, memory, sound, and material transformation, creating visual and sonic spaces where feeling can exist before it is fully named.

Two philosophies guide his work. Through REFRAMED, his design and creative practice, Hernandez advances innovation through inspiration, using research, cultural reference, observation, and collaboration to reframe existing ideas into new possibilities. Through La Chimia, his studio philosophy of transformation through reclamation, he works with discarded, inherited, and emotionally charged materials-especially reclaimed canvases, layered surfaces, and residual marks. Accumulation, repair, rupture, and revision become formal strategies and metaphors for survival, memory, and becoming.

Black is pivotal to Hernandez's visual language: ground, atmosphere, protection, memory, and possibility. Nearly a uniform across his studio and design practice, it holds contrast and allows color, line, voice, and gesture to emerge with greater force. For Hernandez, black is not emptiness; it is a generative archive of what is concealed, carried, and still becoming.

Literature, poetry, and experimental writing shape his approach to abstraction as visual writing. Through synesthetic perception and musical practice, he translates voice, rhythm, and sound into color, gesture, pacing, and composition. This extends into Kuroskuro, his evolving music-centered project, named for kuro, the Japanese word for black, and its echo of chiaroscuro's language of light and shadow.

Hernandez approaches creativity as a living conversation. His work invites reflection without demanding a single answer, asking what an image can say before language reaches it and what becomes possible when a viewer's memory enters the space of a painting.

Website: https://www.jhonnatanhernandez.com

Instagram: @jh.nnatan