Magdalena Fernández

The work consists of a monumental video-installation projected on an “L” shaped wall of a visual sequence repeated in loop that builds − by means of light giving rise to lines that become cross structures − a grid pattern that visually renders the in crescendo of a tropical storm.
2iPM009 continues the artist’s intricate work process, in which she has progressively incorporated manipulable immaterial elements such as light and movement in her production. Since 2004, Fernández has also resorted to digital animation and sound for the construction of pieces formally based on abstract geometry, with influences of the sketches by Lewitt, Soto, Mondrian and Gego (Gertrude Goldschmit), but attempting a more human dissection derived from the use of certain elements from nature − in this case, sound, whether produced by a storm, coquí frogs, macaws or parrots.
It is precisely this tropical sound that triggers movement or action in Fernández’s amiable geometry, conferring to it a particular identity, and it is the rendering of nature that endows the line with movement, being this connection between the visual and the aural what transforms these experiments with light and sound into personal experiences for the spectator, and award to geometry a vital and emotive character.
Fernández’s geometric experiment accommodates itself, adapts itself to the dimension of nature and, consequently, of the human. The actions of light in space may be considered an element of reiteration, progressive and continuous, always requiring a development, a process. It is in this transformation that light becomes connected with the time of nature.
The animated growth of the intersecting lines gradually draws the progressive frequency of the sound in the manner of a stethoscope of nature, perhaps in an attempt to restrain the latter, to render it a measurable space, one with a scale we can handle.
The spectators’ experience is a powerful one, irrespective of whether they arrive at the beginning of the loop, when the dots that are sensitive to light begin to appear and become transformed into horizontal and vertical lines; or if, on the other hand, the storm has reached its climax and begins to subside. The sound evokes the memory of rain, and the grid pattern created by the light renders that which is absent, present, in a sort of constant negotiation with reality and the representation of the architecture of the gesture of the falling raindrops. The spectators thus perceive the metonymic quality of nature through the geometric, as if they were inside a camera obscura, and they live, as in a mirror reflection, the experience of that constant evanescence of the image that is created, becomes intensified and disappears, in the same way as the storm that is born and dies, and is as strong as it is temporal, subject to ephemerality.