Diango Hernández translates a world view through waves. The project began seven years ago by translating texts into a wave font of his own design. Perhaps at first the waves referred to the short but often impassable distance between his homeland island, Cuba and the nearest dry land. But they resonate as a more universal network of communication across vast conceptual distances. Diango’s waves have since evolved into a complex visual language; everything may be mediated, filtered, translated, textured by waves. It’s a way of seeing. A political project, with a deeply aesthetic heart.

For his new NFT, Diango has been testing the language of painting through the possibilities afforded by digital media. He’s testing the possibilities of portraiture - that most established genre of painting. As he says, “In the centre of it all should be the human figure, our bodies and ideas, our dreams…” Can the language of painting inhabit the digital space, beyond merely an image? Could the painting do something in this space that it cannot on the canvas? And could we capture the very process of how it might do it?