Diango Hernández emerged in the early 1990s within Cuba’s cultural scene, at a moment marked by economic collapse and political uncertainty following the end of the Soviet Union. Early collective initiatives and the founding of Ordo Amoris Cabinet with Francis Acea positioned his work within a critical and conceptual framework that quickly gained international visibility. After relocating to Europe in the early 2000s, Hernández developed a practice shaped by conceptual art, design, and political awareness. His work has been widely exhibited and recognized with major awards, including the Rubens Prize in 2009.
In recent years, Diango Hernández has expanded his practice into the digital sphere. With over 1.4 million followers, he was among the first artists to treat Instagram as an active site of artistic production rather than a promotional tool. Through Instopia, he describes the platform as a studio without walls, where images circulate in real time and emotion becomes a form of knowledge. This interview explores his thinking around Olaismo, emotional universalism, the sea as a non-rigid language, and the role of art in reorganizing perception beyond fixed narratives.
You are a prolific creative who exists beyond the bounds of a mere artist. I read you as a philosophical commentator of emotion who, like many great minds before you whom you cite as influences, seeks to dismantle existence into its constituent points and through emotion seek to understand them or translate these into their hidden purities. Would you agree with this view, and if not, how would you best describe the total meaning or purpose of your oeuvre and practice?
I understand the reading, and I recognize myself in parts of it, but I would slightly shift the emphasis. I do not begin from philosophy in order to arrive at emotion; I begin from lived experience and allow emotion to function as a form of knowledge. Emotion, for me, is not something expressive or ornamental—it is an analytical tool. It is often more precise than language, more honest than theory, and capable of revealing structures that remain invisible when approached only intellectually.
My practice is less about dismantling existence than about slowing it down. By isolating fragments—objects, gestures, colors, architectural forms, memories—I try to create situations in which their latent meanings can surface. What might appear as reduction is, in fact, a way of concentrating reality until it becomes legible again.
Today it is increasingly clear that time, chronology, and history are no longer stable frameworks. They are bending, overlapping, and deforming under the pressure of lived experience, technology, memory, and desire. I believe art is one of the main agents capable of making this visible—not by illustrating history, but by reorganizing how we perceive it. In my work, past, present, and imagined futures coexist simultaneously, not as a narrative, but as a field of tensions.
If there is a purpose to the work, it is not to offer conclusions or purities, but to produce a state of heightened attention. I am interested in building complete systems—visual, spatial, emotional—where contradictions can coexist without being resolved. In that sense, the work is not didactic or philosophical in the traditional sense; it is experiential.
Ultimately, I do not see the artist as someone who explains the world, but as someone who reorganizes perception. If the work succeeds, it opens a space where memory, desire, history, and imagination overlap, allowing viewers to recognize something they already knew but had not yet articulated.
In all of your interviews four main subjects arise: subversion (or dismantling to seek resolution), the role of geopolitics on individuals as either a label or state they exist within, the fluidity of truth (or “fiction” vs. hard history), and the key role of emotional universalism. Can you discuss the importance of each in a way that explains your core Olaismo philosophy?
These four elements are not separate themes for me; they are different entry points into the same structure. Together, they form what I understand as Olaismo—not a style, but a way of thinking and organizing reality.
Subversion, or dismantling, is not an act of negation. I am not interested in destroying systems, but in opening them. By taking things apart—objects, narratives, symbols, architectures—I try to reveal how they were constructed and where they can still move. Resolution, if it appears, is never final; it remains provisional, like a wave that only exists while it is in motion.
Geopolitics is unavoidable, but I resist its use as a fixed label. I am less interested in geopolitics as ideology than in how political structures quietly shape daily life, desires, and limitations. Rather than speaking about geopolitics, I speak from within its consequences. Olaismo operates from a position of productive disconnection, where identity is not denied but constantly reconfigured, allowing the work to move beyond national or ideological boundaries without pretending they do not exist.
The fluidity of truth—between fiction and history—is central to my practice. History is never neutral; it is edited, framed, and narrated. Fiction, on the other hand, can sometimes be more precise in revealing emotional or structural truths. In Olaismo, fiction is not an escape from history but a tool to bend it, to make visible what official chronologies suppress. Time becomes elastic: past, present, and imagined futures coexist and inform one another.
Emotional universalism is what allows all of this to remain communicative rather than hermetic. Emotion precedes language, ideology, and geography. It is a shared territory. By working through emotion, the work can be read without prior knowledge of context, while still carrying complex historical and political density. Emotion is not simplification; it is a form of precision that cuts across difference.
Taken together, these elements define Olaismo as a visual and conceptual grammar in which instability is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be embraced. It is a way of understanding the world as something in constant movement—like a wave—where meaning emerges not from fixed positions, but from the tension between them.
You have described the sea as a “language without rigidity” and the source of your “completeness,” a feeling so potent that you have spent years translating it into symbols which then have been printed across the world. What was it about the seas experiential context that imprinted itself on you so deeply that it became a living extension of yourself? When you ask us to view your waves, which sensations do you hope to trigger in us, and can you describe the feelings you embody poetically when thinking of the sea so that we might also carry the same with us every time we encounter your work?
The sea taught me that meaning does not need structure to be complete. It is a space where order and chaos coexist without hierarchy, where repetition never produces the same result. Growing up with it, the sea became a physical lesson in continuity, change, and freedom—something that is always present, yet never fixed. That is why it feels like an extension of myself rather than a subject.
When I ask viewers to look at my waves, I am not asking them to read symbols, but to remember sensations: weightlessness, suspension, rhythm, and a quiet sense of belonging. The sea, for me, is not dramatic—it is generous. It carries time, memory, and loss without naming them. Poetically, it is a horizon that never closes, a body that breathes without intention. If those feelings remain with the viewer after encountering the work, then the wave has done its job.
You have accumulated over 1.4 million followers and were one of the first established artists to use Instagram as a “studio without walls”. Through your Instopia project you interface with realities that are both real and purposefully illusory. Strikingly beautiful as well I might add. Could you discuss how your work has been received in this digital sphere versus within physical galleries seeing that you have been an artist for many decades and know how life was before social media. Could by extension also tell us how your personal perception of people has been influenced by how they behave online versus how they act in the real?
Instagram did not change my work; it changed the speed and the direction of its circulation. I approached it early as a studio without walls—a space for testing images, intuitions, and emotional temperatures rather than for documentation or promotion. Instopia operates precisely in that tension: what looks immediate and seductive is often carefully constructed, while what appears casual may carry years of thought.
The reception is fundamentally different. In the digital sphere, the encounter is fast, intuitive, and emotional; the work reaches people before context, before explanation. In the physical gallery, time slows down. The body enters, scale matters, materials resist the image. Both are valid, but they activate different layers of perception. One is atmospheric, the other experiential.
As for people, the contrast is revealing. Online, individuals perform certainty, identity, and opinion. In real life, they are far more fragile, contradictory, and open. Social media amplifies desire and fear simultaneously. Experiencing both worlds has reinforced my belief that art must remain a space where complexity is allowed—where ambiguity is not a weakness, but a form of truth.
The art world (at least the one I have inhabited) exists and survives by repetition—by continuously reaffirming the same values, the same hierarchies, the same narratives. Over time, this produces a system built on prejudice and rigid, pre-set boundaries that often mistake familiarity for quality.
Instagram, and social media more broadly, have begun to dilute this structure. For the first time, circulation is no longer controlled exclusively by institutions, gatekeepers, or inherited authority. Images move faster than permission, and meaning can emerge before validation. This shift has exposed both the fragility and the arbitrariness of many long-held assumptions within the art world.
It is the first moment in my lifetime that I can clearly identify as a genuine revolution within the arts—not because it replaces institutions, but because it forces them to confront a reality they no longer fully control.
You have previously celebrated the “amateur” as a figure of resistance against the state’s demands for notions of perfection. Yet, now being a highly successful, world-renowned artist who is embraced by the institutions, one who has arrived on his own terms, does the rejection of institutional power still apply? Please explain how your purposeful subversion via process holds a mirror to the system and teaches it and us something about each other that we haven’t yet realized.
For me, the amateur was never a position of skill, but a position of freedom. It describes a way of working that is not fully captured by expectations, protocols, or the demand for coherence. In that sense, it is not something one outgrows with success; it is something one must actively protect.
Institutional recognition does not cancel this position, because the tension remains. Systems tend to stabilize meaning, to fix value and interpretation. Process, for me, is where resistance still operates. By allowing intuition, detours, and even apparent inefficiencies to guide decisions, the work resists becoming fully optimized or predictable.
This kind of purposeful subversion does not attack the system from the outside; it reflects it back to itself. It reveals how much value depends on control, repetition, and consensus. What the system—and we—may not yet fully realize is that openness, vulnerability, and not-knowing are not weaknesses, but generative conditions. The amateur reminds us that meaning is not produced by perfection, but by attention and risk.
Your training in industrial design taught you about the importance of radical re-signification of the material world, allowing you to see the deeper meaning within objects while displaced from their function. From here you can make “drawing,” which is to say art, from anything. In this mode of making art from existence per se (in itself), what do you think this says about the ontological or foundational nature of art and human experience by extension? Is all of life art necessarily, even if unnoticed, or does our gaze and intention convert life into it?
Industrial design taught me that objects are never neutral. Function is only one layer; meaning begins where function ends or fails. When an object is displaced from its use, it does not lose value—it gains the ability to speak differently. Drawing, for me, is precisely that: the act of extracting meaning from the world without adding decoration.
This does not mean that all of life is art by default. Life is raw, excessive, and often indifferent. Art begins with attention. It emerges when intention reorganizes experience and makes relationships visible. The gaze does not invent meaning, but it activates it.
In that sense, art is not separate from human experience, nor is it identical to it. It is a condition that appears when perception becomes conscious of itself. Art is not everywhere, but it is always possible.
Your drawing “Locos” really stood out to me because it appeared to be your exegesis of Raphael’s Madonna with Child (study for The Grand Duke’s Madonna). Your world recognized wave form distortions share loose resonances with works like Jacques Lipchitz’s Prométhée et le Vautour or Alberto Savinio’s Ricordo di una famiglia who I don’t think you were inspired by. This leads me to ask, how do you feel about the phenomenon of artists separated by time and history unconsciously sharing the resemblant styles or similar modes of expression? Do you think this occurs because we are necessarily limited to only what we can imagine, which is itself a shared human nature?
I do not experience these resonances as influence, but as convergence. When artists separated by time arrive at similar forms, it is rarely because they are looking at one another; it is because they are touching the same underlying questions. Certain structures—distortion, fragmentation, bending—reappear when representation reaches its limits and needs to be rethought.
In Locos, the dialogue with Raphael is not iconographic but structural: an attempt to test how intimacy, devotion, and instability can coexist within a single image. The affinities you note with Jacques Lipchitz or Alberto Savinio belong to that same territory. They emerge when form begins to register pressure—historical, emotional, or existential.
I am not the first to think that we are connected to something like a shared cloud—a collective reservoir of images, intuitions, and emotional frequencies. I believe our minds access it not intellectually, but through emotion, almost like waves tuning into the same signal. At certain moments, I feel I have connected to that same cloud that others accessed before me.
This does not suggest limitation, but continuity. Imagination is individual in its expression, yet shared in its source. We return to similar forms not because we lack originality, but because certain visual languages are activated when human experience reaches comparable thresholds. Art does not invent endlessly new worlds; it reconfigures the same world again and again, each time revealing something that could only appear now.
You compared Rembrandt’s clinical Anatomy Lesson to Caravaggio’s Incredulity of Saint Thomas, stating that the priority of art is to “put a finger where it hurts.” Many artists have done this across time, but it hasn’t resulted in the best of possible worlds, yet it has solved many particular spiritual or emotional maladies for people individually who in their own ways helped the world to heal. Do you think art can ever save the world per se, or is its role to serve as a mirror until we enter the eschaton?
When I compared Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson to Caravaggio’s Incredulity of Saint Thomas, I was pointing to the same ethical gesture: art placing its finger exactly where it hurts. Not to provoke for its own sake, but to make pain visible, tangible, undeniable.
I do not believe art can save the world as a totality. That expectation is too grand and, in a way, unfair. But art can save fragments of it—people, moments, inner landscapes. And those individual recalibrations matter. Art works at the scale of conscience and sensation; it repairs locally, emotionally, spiritually. In that sense, it is less a tool for salvation than a mirror that insists we look.
Whether that mirror accompanies us until an eschaton or simply helps us endure the present is secondary. Its task is to remain honest.
Please do share with us any gallery shows or projects you are now working on or are set to arrive in the future, or share with us any words of wisdom that you feel may be of importance.
In recent years, I have become increasingly cautious toward institutions. Covid was a turning point. It revealed how deeply most institutions—at least in Europe—operate under the guidance and patronage of the state and its politics. For a long time, perhaps out of illusion or necessity, I believed institutions were beacons of free thinking, intrinsically aligned with the autonomy of art. I no longer believe this to be true.
As a consequence, I have largely lost my appetite for institutional exhibitions. At this moment, I am working directly for people, without mediation. Instagram has become my primary space of action—a place where images circulate freely, where emotion precedes validation, and where access is not regulated by authority. I consider it, quite literally, the best museum in the world today.
If there is a final thought worth sharing, it is this: do not confuse stability with truth. The world is bending—time, history, identity, perception—and art must bend with it. Not to provide answers, but to remain a space where complexity can exist without fear.
