Magdalena Fernández
Objects and Spaces of Light
Author: Susana Benko
ArtNexus No. 68 - Dec 2007
|  | Magdalena Fernández is a Venezuelan artist with a sustained international career. A graphic designer by training, Fernández opted for art as a medium to realize her thoughts and sensory experiences. After her graduation in 1989 from the Neumann Institute, which is renowned for the education of the country’s prominent graphic designers, Fernández traveled to Italy, where she studied in A.G. Fronzoni’s workshop. She has exhibited her work steadily since 1991, in individual and group shows in Italy, Venezuela, Portugal, the United States, Israel, France, Brazil, Argentina, and garnered accolades from critics and public viewers everywhere. Her works possess the uncommon quality of rousing one’s capacity for awe and become an unforgettable experience for the viewer.
Indeed, Fernández’s works provoke diverse appreciations. As in the development of any artist, her oeuvre evolved and went through different periods. In her case, one can distinguish between two broad tendencies: her objects, which have an architectural or sculptural appearance, depending on their size and format; and her perceptual works, composed of projections and videos that induce sensations within a composed environment. Fernández masters both intimate formats and large-scale installations. All of her works, however, are based on a common axis: space as an expressive element and as the means for perceptual situations and aesthetic experiences.
The consolidation of a new geometry
Having developed in the 1950s, Venezuela’s geometric visual tradition has endured into the early twenty-first century. Aside from geometry, newer generations of artists are interested in aspects of kinetic exploration, such as motion and spatiality. Questioned by some and respected by others, this modern legacy has been greatly influential in the development of contemporary art in Venezuela.
Under this premise, local critics have associated Fernández’s work with Gego and Soto, as well as with European Constructivism, Italian Spatialism, and Brazilian Neo-Concrete art. Although Fernández doesn’t deny an emotional affinity to Gego’s oeuvre and shares Soto’s interest in the exploration of space as the work’s constitutive element, she has been careful to establish specific guidelines for her own investigations. One of these guidelines is the natural or organic meaning of her work. This quality, understood in a different way by her predecessors Gego and Soto, also separates Fernández from the functionalism of orthodox European Constructivism and its search for a utopian society, and it distances her from a cold conception of geometry solely as a relationship between exact geometric shapes. Fernández comes from the world of mathematics (a career she began in her youth at Andrés Bello Catholic University) and from the Italian design school at the hands of the prestigious Fronzoni, a school for which the product’s formal and material purity must respond to its impeccable finish. Yet, throughout the years, Fernández has used the rational means of mathematics and design to incorporate or express her communion with nature. From the start, her spaces can be appreciated not as sterile but rather as spaces for phenomenological investigation, spaces that arouse an inner intrigue and induce a kind of perceptual surprise. Fernández’s works provoke an inner experience that is similar to that of poetry.
Fernández owes two of the notions underlying her work to Fronzoni, her teacher: a method that allows her to develop works in any visual discipline, and an awareness and understanding of space. According to constructive parameters, the artist applies a reticule or a series of modules that she can work indistinctly into her sculptures and installations or into her ambient projections and videos. For example, in her Estructuras, small drawings on diverse transparent materials (nylon, metacrylate, polyester, etc.) and stainless steel, the compositional pattern was revealed through the serial repetition of elements (like planes and lines). Other examples were anchored sculptures like those exhibited at the Fourth Guyana Biennial (1993) and the Second Pirelli Salon (1995, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Caracas); the work 4em994, seen at Avida Dollars Gallery in Milan (“Contemporanea-mente,” 1994); the work 8i998, which won at the Fifty-sixth Arturo Michelena Salon; the work 1em000 (exhibited at the Fifty-eighth Arturo Michelena Salon, 2000); and the work 6em000 (seen at Disegno Arte Contemporanea Gallery, Mantova, Italy, 2000). All of these anchored sculptures were dominated by an architectural vision that complemented the exhibition space. These were still object-based works, in which shapes made with industrial materials (polished aluminum tubes, PVC, stainless-steel bars) were employed in the space. Two features shared by the Estructuras and these sculptures prefigured Fernández’s later works: transparency and a suggestion of the immaterial. The artist achieved this with transparent, colorless materials like polyester and acrylic and with linear shapes of aluminum or stainless steel bars.
This method was essential to Fernández’s large installations, but an understanding of space was also integral to her work. Her earliest installations, which engulfed the exhibition space, were conceived with geometric elements: points and lines made of industrial materials like black rubber or iron spheres, glass or PVC balls, optical fibers, stainless steel cylinders, etc. Particularly masterful were her installations for the exhibition “Estructuras” (at Sala Mendoza, 1993); the installations for the First and Second Pirelli Salons (1993 and 1995, respectively); 1i996, exhibited in 1996 at the Galería Centro Verifica 8+1, in Mestre, Italy; as well as her handling of planes in installations like those presented in 2001 at the Furniture Salon in Milan (Ágape) and at the “Subtle Cities” event in Chiostri di San Micheletto, Lucca, Italy.
All of these works retained the treatment of geometric elements operating within a given space. Nevertheless, Fernández sought to transcend the shapes’ mere composition and balance: she established a connection with the natural world via an abstract, and perhaps universal, language. This happened through the use of natural elements like air and water (and even fire) as the substance of the work, or through direct relationships with the natural organic world, as in a video of ants invading a space, presented as part of the group show “Utópolis” at Caracas’s Galería de Arte Nacional, 2001. In this video, the earth served as a fourth element, the place where the life of the insects unfolded. Similarly, earth supported the anchored sculptures mentioned earlier as well as some “germinations” the artist has created with garden interventions, as in the beautiful work with river pebbles in the Parque de la Amistad Israel-Iberoamérica, the interventions in the Museo Alejandro Otero’s park (now closed) on the occasion of the Fifth Clay Biennial of the Americas Roberto Guevara, and the Alegorías al Jardín de las Delicias event.
Organic geometries and natural projections
The evolution of Magdalena Fer-nández’s art has tended toward the elimination of structures, or, at least, to the suppression of their objective condition. Alongside the objects, the artist explored space as the protagonist of her art in works that were no longer forms in space but space built as form. There were important precedents, like 2em996, the winner of the Single Prize at the eighth edition of the Eugenio Mendoza Award (1996). Although still an object created with PVC tubes and aluminum connectors, it was also ethereal and seemed to levitate. Viewing it was to see air as the indispensable element for the suspension of form, geometry “volatized,” and the effect was that of a suspended line in constant motion. Other precedents were spatial works in light and others in complete darkness. Of the latter, 2i997 was exhibited at the Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto in 1997 and 4i000 at the Museo Alejandro Otero in 2000. Both, as Luis Enrique Pérez Oramas said at the time, demarcated site as art. This demarcation was made by the installation of lines and points of light in 2i997 and4i000, respectively; both the lines and points were created by bulbs with a plastic laminate that multiplied the light. In other works, viewers entered fully darkened spaces devoid of recognizable spatial cues; they were isolated from their immediate everyday environment and experienced emptiness and light as plastic elements. Along with exploring space as the site of beauty and inner experience, these installations made specifically for their site were interactive and allowed the public to move the light beams and points, thus creating drawings in space made by luminous movements. By erasing all spatial references, Fernández induced viewers to experience the absence of a horizon and to perceive elements that triggered unique aesthetic moments.
The aforementioned works along with “Aires,” a 1998 show at Sala Mendoza, prefigured the installations exhibited as part of “Superficies,” a transcendent show at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Caracas and at Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO) in Miami, in 2006, as well as Fernández’s brilliant participation in the First Biennial of the End of the World in Ushuaia, Argentina. Without diminishing the contributions of her object-based works, “Aires” was the point of departure for Fernández’s later work. After that show, the artist consciously and maturely deepened her exploration of the unlimited possibilities of space as a support for the work. In “Aires,” she integrated three of the primordial natural elements into the installation: air, water, and fire—all interacting with the movement of light. In this installation, the space seemed empty, but the diversity of the reflected light gave weight to the space. The undulating lights were projected on the gallery’s walls and ceiling and in perpetual motion, reflected by water in PVC and glass tanks on the floor. Compressors pumped the water, a technique that anticipated later projections in “Superficies.”
In “Superficies,” held eight years later, there were moving drawings whose geometric shapes were projected and constantly shifting lights. In this show, besides Fernández’s use of air, water, and fire, allusions to the natural and the organic were even more explicit. Some projections in this exhibition were accompanied by animal noises and sounds, rhythmically synchronized to the transformations of the visual forms. For example, each linear movement was accompanied by insect sounds, as in 1dm03 (Eleuttherodactylus caqui). This soundtrack was derived from observing the movements of nature. In a different work, 1pm006 (Ara ararauna), the artist employed humor—and, strangely, color—as an expressive element.
Another light installation, this time in a lit space, was 1i007, presented by Fernández at the First Biennial of the End of the World held in Ushuaia, Argentina, in 2007. On that occasion, the artist used optical fibers and a laser highlighter to create a space of light that was perpetually mutable, given the public interaction. This installation created a lit environment, rather than darkness as in previous instances, and was related to the Biennial’s site and one of its key objectives: to present the visions of contemporary artists on the state of ecological emergency at the South Pole. This Biennial explored the image of the End-of the-World, a pertinent one not only for the site’s geography but also for the placement of Fernández’s work in the event’s “Circularidad del tiempo y urgencias ecológicas” section. The installation’s spatial and formal proposition was not only eloquent on the issue, but it also opened new possibilities for the art/nature relationship, ones that are important to the artist’s motivations.
Today, Fernández is faced with a new challenge: to create an large-scale work in one of Caracas’s more densely trafficked squares, Plaza Alfredo Sadel, a project by the architect Jimmy Alcock in Urbanización Las Mercedes. The work is currently under construction. It comprises nine twenty-seven-meters-long tilting masts; two more are placed at the ends, which will reach thirty-five and forty-five meters tall, respectively. The taller masts will hold two light spheres (each 2.5 meters in diameter) made of opal-colored acrylic and lit internally by LED. These spheres will be seen suspended along Las Mercedes’s Avenida Principal and adjacent streets, following to the masts’ angles of tilt. Not only will the installation recover the use of a public space for pedestrians and vehicles but also the artist will bring a light installation to a monumental scale and provide a unique aesthetic experience to viewers in the middle of the city.
Thanks to the methodological and conceptual foundations of her work, Magdalena Fernández has been able to respond to these great challenges. The rationalism that some critics disparage in her work is not only necessary but also relative. From a very sensible perspective, Fernández’s work is based on a new geometry made with contemporary means, and, at bottom, it has a highly organic nature.
In many variations, Fernández presents phenomenological experiences, and her works are conceived as constructions for contemplation. She bases her work on abstraction to prompt the viewer’s intimate relationship with nature and with the environment. This art awakens an overwhelming desire to suspend everyday concerns and rejoice in an atmosphere of uncommon beauty and wonder. |  |
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