José Gabriel Fernández
Sala Mendoza - Universidad Metropolitana. Caracas
José Gabriel Fernández (Caracas, 1957) had in the past developed some installations using bull fighters ́cloaks. At that time the homoerotic figures of the “matadores” had caught his eye. Maybe escaping from that fetishist adoration and in search of some- thing more essential, when he discovered these cloaks he found new forms that led him to a platonic quest. Apparently, as a need to rescue an aesthetic purity.
Fernández works with two-dimensional pieces, using white and showing a preference for cut outs. They are cut and piled up, and upon them he superimposes forms. These forms wish to leave the support and look for new spaces. Other pieces, now three dimensional organic and soft, remind us of brancusian morphologies. They provoke touch, but their unpolluted whiteness denies the enjoyment. As if the extreme purity would prevent it. There is certainly some glaze that penetrates our thought and renders mysterious some pieces that, by contrast, because they are opaque, intend to be transparent.
The pieces revolve around the negative and positive cuts of elements that are not pure, yet induce reflection for going for “moral” solutions instead of scabrous answers that through scandal, seek to call the public ́s attention.
