Terminaciones Nerviosas, 2024
Domestic Exercises. Homework for a Sustainable Togetherness // Open Studios. Villa Romana, Florence.
Excerpt of curatorial note by Elena Agudio
"Rubén D’Hers works with sound, installation, and painting. His work is also a resonating reflection about the possibility of re-weaponising and repurposing the domestic as a space of imagination. As an artistic meditation, his research is an invitation to relearn touching the fabric of listening....Continuing his exploration of materials like acoustic guitars, piano strings, bird feathers, stones, cables, hanging motors, and refrigerators, during his residency Rubén kept experimenting uninterruptedly, and his journey eventually transformed into a very introspective one. Interested in the neural phenomena of listening and especially in how closed spaces sound like and how they can appeal to our involuntary aural imagery, the artist embarked on some scientific and philosophical exploration of the experience of deep listening. Having a large studio at disposal here at Villa Romana, Rubén lingered much into painting as well, and – as often happens when one does that – he found himself delving into the speculative patterns that come with it."
When still living in Venezuela Rubén used to record a lot in a flat where he was living with his family. He was regularly finding himself recording music with his tape recorder in the bathroom, while everyone in the house was asleep. Nourishing a kind of nostalgic relationship to this space – a space where he kept listening to himself and to the sound reflected by the walls – Rubén paints the tiles of this domestic room of his memory and recreates their pattern. Cables are also appearing in the painted composition. They are in his memory image, but also in the larger composition that he creates with his installations. Standing in front of these paintings, one could hear the sound that in some way feels like woven into the canvases, and that eventually reverberates in the larger space of the installation of the artist. In dialogue with the paintings in fact the artist adjusts an old refrigeration on the floor, and transforms it into a musical (chord) instrument. Being since long time intrigued by the sounds of electrodomestics and their humming, and remembering how the many power cuts that one experiences in places like Venezuela erase them and suddenly confront you to a different texture and quality of silence, in Villa Romana D’Hers seems like intoning an accord. One that is quite lyric, and sharp. His installations are in fact complex compositions: sound and sculptural compositions that mobilising painting, objects, noise, and memory reckon with the intricacies of the experience of listening. It is the interdependence of all these elements that give form to his artistic enunciations.
Excerpt from Curatorial + Conceptual Note by Mistura Allison
"...RUBÉN D’HERS’ Terminaciones Nerviosas brings the materiality of domestic space into focus, blending everyday objects with sound and machinery. His two installations—one in a large room and the other in a smaller space speak to the dichotomy of abundance and scarcity that permeates both domestic and public spheres. In the larger space, microphones, medical rubber, and stones interact with controlled DC motors, amplifying the mundane into something monumental. The smaller installation incorporates a refrigerator, piano strings, and a bird feather, a haunting reminder of the quiet violence that resides in objects we take for granted. The refrigerator, silent and unplugged, becomes a ghost of consumption. In many ways, D’Hers’ use of household appliances as musical instruments mirrors the labour of those historically confined to these spaces who like the objects themselves, remain unacknowledged participants in the composition of life. By introducing the malfunctioning or decommissioned into a realm of aesthetics, D’Hers conjures a space of vibrations and continual transformation."
