Issue # 18 Sylvia Fernández

Curated By: Nicolás Gómez Echeverri

Visits to the body: Looking at Sylvia Fernández’s recent work.

Human life is conditioned by the dialectic between knowledge of spaces and that of places. For geographer Yi Fu Tuan, space is openness, freedom, and possibility, but also vulnerability, while place is restriction, protection, and shelter. They are codependent concepts; from the stability and security of the place we are aware of the extension and threat of the space and vice versa. In recent months we have settled this definition, forced to take care of ourselves in the confinement of private places due to the threat found in public spaces.

In modern times - since the seventeenth century until now - the representation of landscapes has been possible due to the encounter with the unknown. Encouraging traveling and relocation, the alluring of the unchartered, recognizes places and spaces of desire that are different from those already known. Limiting our movement and transit makes these encounters impossible, but nonetheless increases desires for wonder, which is precisely the reason for the existence of landscapes in the history of painting.

Confined to the city, we get used to the grid of buildings, doors, bars and windows through which we frame the outside world. Amidst cement and steel, these structures replicate and multiply on the outside, becoming the ordinary and predictable landscape. Its orthogonality invades perspective and its consistently perpendicular and parallel lines define the vanishing point of a free, poignant space. In confinement, mobility and the meeting of bodies is limited and its own action gives meaning to space. The passing of time is enclosed between the windowsills, mobile phones and computer screens, and takes on a rigid imprisoned shape.

However, paintings through their infinite evocative power - which have challenged countless announced fatalities – show us that landscapes can occur from dimensions and points of view different from that of the urban explorer who seeks revelations within the vast nature of the there. Sylvia Fernández's paintings reveal the intimate landscape —the here—, which can also be between the legs, in the topography of the mass, between bulges and edges, tissues and fluids, in the markings, abrasions and consequences of the skin, between the entanglement of organs and limbs or of possible microscopic worlds.

The artist refers to "A body that [begins] to feel, to read, to look and to recognize in a different way, born from its observation to a phase in which its presence is constant, intimate, individual and silent." If the landscape of artistic tradition occurred through the encounter with the unfamiliar and strange, the recent paintings of Sylvia Fernández make it possible through the affirmation of the most intimate and dear. Our place is the body itself and through its actions we understand the spaces that we transform into landscapes. This time, paintings acknowledge the body as a landscape, as it is testimony to the organic, dreamlike or emotional occurrences that take place and that make it also an open space of adventure.

When the artist refers to her work, she tends to reaffirm the pleasure of her craft and the joyful dialogue with the circumstances of painting (certainly the most obvious being those that allow color and matter). When a painter paints, gestures make the surface a space of possibility. The effect of this joy transforms into a subjective landscape, determined by planes of depth and horizons existing in the immediate vicinity, without having to look beyond the doors, walls and windows. The landscape exceeds the conquering will of the modern man in order to dignify the elemental joy of intimate and silent action. Nonetheless, as a response to joy — which is both sensation and feeling — while examining the body, one finds pain — which is also simultaneously sensation and feeling. In the set of paintings that refer to pain, the artist shows us how this word is expressed in terms of painting: it contracts and expands, it concentrates and it radiates, it's low or high pitched, it is subtle or intense. These paintings are a vanitas, a reminder of the banality, of the excess of the external and of the grandstanding illusions, evoking the inevitable vulnerability of our body punished by the possibility of its ailments and rescued by the possibility of a hug.

1. (Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press: 1977 / 25th ed. 2001).  

Nicolás Gómez Echeverri 

Nicolás Gómez Echeverri (B. Bogotá, Colombia)

Artist, researcher and curator. Ba degree in Art at Los Andes University (Bogotá) and a Master’s degree in Art History at Goldsmiths University (London). Since 2018 he is the Executive Director of the MAC - Museum of Contemporary Art - Lima. He has worked as a curator for many institutions in Colombia, such as Museo Nacional (Bogotá), Museo La Tertulia (Cali) and Banco de la República Museum (Bogotá), where he was chief curator from 2014 to 2018. He regularly writes and publishes research and critique papers on Latin American modern and contemporary art.