(b Caracas, 1951).
Venezuelan collagist and drawer or please maintain “visual artist” (absolutely not, he experimented with felt but cannot be considered a textile artist). Herrera received a Bachelor’s degree in Arts from the University of Tulsa, OK, in 1982 and a Master’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1992. Herrera’s work includes painting, murals, sculpture, photography, painted books, print, felt pieces, and installations, but he is best known for the series of collages he produced in the early years of his artistic career in which form and abstraction collide and the ambiguity between chaos and order arises. In his prolific work the influence of pop culture, Abstract Expressionism, and surreal gestures is notable.
For the collages series, Herrera repeatedly used cartoons as a starting point for his creative process, pointing to a hinge between the folkloric and the popular to express a critical perspective on the complexity of modern and contemporary culture. In this stage of his work, the key elements of construction are the fragmentation and the juxtaposition of the form merged with experimentation and playfulness. Herrera tapped into the relationship capacity of the unconscious using elements that remain recognizable for the viewer yet new. In this form of construction his collages hold the possibility of elaborating different and multiple visual associations through reorganize, recompose, and reconfigure meanings, and ambiguities....
