It has been pretty incredible watching the career of artist Rosé Hernandez to consider how little recognition has been afforded him in his own hometown. Operating in a vein, most immediately, of Kristie and Usama Alshaibi’s countenancing of ritual extremes, Hernandez has sadly toiled in obscurity in DIY venues throughout the city for years now, paying the bills with a coffee-shop job in Pilsen, and has been cropping up in important art venues in Los Angeles, most recently including the Geffen Contemporary stage at MOCA Los Angeles, and was curated into a signal exhibit at L.A.’s Human Resources Gallery with a lineup of important artists including boychild, Divinity Fudge, La Porscha, Sage Charles and Ron Athey. His raw, operatic, delimiting ability to throw himself into the work is nonpareil in its dive into the sluice of squalorous human abjection. Brutalist, beautiful and articulate, Hernandez is quietly and uniquely setting the Lydia Lunch-style standard for integral art performance in the city.
