Harper’s Los Angeles is happy to announce Been Right here Earlier than, New York-based artist Nicasio Fernandez’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation options new oil work by Fernandez and can be on view by July 13, 2024.
Throughout Been Right here Earlier than, Fernandez creates a world that teeters alongside the boundaries of the acquainted and the international by personifying uncooked emotion. The artist transforms emotions of angst, frustration, melancholia, and uncertainty into anthropomorphic vessels who’re the protagonists of heated scenes. Calling consideration to humanity’s frequent estrangement from emotional and psychic house, Fernandez displaces these caricatures from normative human look. With elongated limbs and magnified facial options, the brilliantly-hued figures emit a fantastical presence. They summon the surreal aesthetics and esoteric questioning discovered throughout mid-twentieth century Chicago Imagist portray and Expressionism.
Fernandez tends to start with have an effect on. An emotional state beckons a phrase or time period which then conjures a picture. The work Gutted for instance, emerges from the descriptive verb to intestine, which describes a harrowed state of disappointment. Right here, a distressed character with a subdued, but, fiery orange complexion leans towards the bottom. As if a supernatural strike has descended upon the determine’s intestine, their abdomen is inverted: the organ protrudes from their again in a distended hump. With their mouth agape and eyes fastened in an uneasy glare, the determine seems to yell in frustration, or maybe, gasp for air—recalling a timeless response to misery. Fernandez applies the pigment in an expressive, albeit, exactly managed method: layered brushstrokes greet profound earthy pigment that colours a recent home house and grounds us within the troubling realities that usually hang-out on a regular basis human life.
Generally, like in Lesson, which bears referential qualities to Pierre Bonnard and Phillip Guston’s equally titled works, a number of figures replicate the negotiation of assorted feelings without delay. Inside this placing work, a decided determine shaded in blazing purple paint, crushes a sullen yellow determine beneath their palm—as if conquering the burden of melancholy itself. A ghostly physique overlooks the scene from a distance, mixing into the shadows of a teal-colored hall.
In Storm, we’re transported once more to a panorama of rage. A livid determine clutches an ax amidst an ominous sky on this enthralling work. With furrowed brows and a conniving grin, the determine’s unwavering disposition refutes confinement very similar to the expanse that presides above, threatening to unleash a deluge at any second. The viewer is left to ponder what preceded the warmth of the second. One would possibly even ponder their very own actions amidst a match of rage.
For rage, very similar to the entire feelings referenced in Been Right here Earlier than, is a timeless inner sentiment. It brews inside our unconscious till it bubbles as much as the floor and provokes decision-making throughout the exterior world. All through Been Right here Earlier than, Fernandez repeatedly visualizes this infinite battle between interiority and exteriority, inviting the viewer to converge the psychic, emotional, and physiological qualities that inform the human expertise. For Fernandez, human existence is an amalgam of those parts. Predicated on dynamic investigations of the self, to be human is to concede our favorable, perplexing, and at instances polemic inside workings.