I, Joseph A. Hernandez, am a contemporary artist and business educator based in Topeka, Kansas, whose work explores the tension between external order and internal experience. Unlike artists who reside solely in the studio, I bring a dual perspective: for over a decade, I have served as a supply chain leader, managing high-stakes logistics for global retailers and non-profit food distributions. The artistic practice functions as a counter-balance to the rigid systems I navigate in my professional life. As a former supply chain leader and computer skills educator, I deal in logic, logistics, and linear progression. As an artist, I dismantle those structures to map the chaotic, non-linear landscape of the human subconscious.Working in Contemporary Surrealism and Expressive Abstraction, I utilize atmospheric layering, symbolic narrative, and textured brushwork to explore themes of isolation, memory, and metamorphosis.
My work ranges from the context of the street to hotels, living areas, communal spaces, and professional settings. Focused more on ethereal, esoteric, or abstract visions of the experience of life. The work is an effort to convey the need for understanding and openness. Expressing myself in such a way to confuse and delight the viewer, in a sense knocks them off balance while keeping their interest. I utilize color scheme and multiple materials; to help distort perceptions and create a sense of reality that is both illusory and tactile. The result is a dream-like vision juxtaposed against the familiar. My compositions often place the organic human form against dissonant environments, questioning where the ‘system’ ends and the individual begins. Operating outside the traditional gallery model, I circulate my work through private professional networks in the technology, executive, and professional sectors. My collectors, Healthcare Professionals, CFOs, Supply Chain leaders, connect with the work not because it mirrors their professional lives, but because it offers a necessary portal into the intuitive and the metaphysical.
In the past months, my work has been viewed in over a hundred cities worldwide places like Paris, Hong Kong, Tel Aviv, Santiago, Istanbul, Mexico City, and Punta del Este.. I’m grateful for that reach, because it means the work is doing what I hoped it would do: give people a moment of space inside their own lives. I still live and work in Kansas, where the horizon is wide and the quiet runs deep. That landscape continues to shape the internal worlds I paint; surreal, introspective, and searching for balance between what we hold together and what we let fall apart. Art remains a strong vehicle of how we share our thoughts and ideas. Art is a space to display confidently who you are and what you must give to the world. So many of us think and feel in a way, that is traditionally looked down on, and yet we persevere, survive. It is a glorious thing to know the weight you have lifted off your shoulders and be able to see a path through creativity towards helping others on their own journey.
I calculate the use of materials in each work based on space at the time. Those works that aremessier, the more chaotic, the less structured, highlight my personal descents into depression, anxiety, and hyper fixation. Works like; “The Thief”, “The Mudroom”, and “Evening Façade”, highlight times of internal conflict, a searching, for a meaning that is still undefined. While works like; “Summer Evening at the Lake”, “All the worlds a stage”, and “Return of First Mother” are meant to be more playful, dreamlike, wondrous, and imperfect, almost as though a child’s imagination was expressed as an adult. Purposeful and intentional exaggeration to create more of a flowing effect for the viewer, rather than a concern for perfection.
Tigers Paw Prints 