ROBERT FERNANDEZ
ARTIST STATEMENT
In my recent work, such as Sphinx and Torch, I explore the process by which duration becomes dimensional, or fixed and architectural.
I paint by putting marks on a support (most often with a series of gestures and by squeezing oil and/or watercolor paint from tubes or scattering powdered pigment, and most often on canvas and paper) then printing on other supports and sometimes rinsing or distressing the surface along the way. I am not trying to precisely register colors and shapes, as with professional printing, but to paint by printing, or with no clear image in mind but with the awareness of the possibility that an image may emerge through the printing process. When it does, the traces and layers, thicknesses and colors, varieties of peels, stains, bleeds, smashes, textures of different media, etc. merge like film stills.
Unlike a painting by say de Kooning, which largely conceals the traces of multiple sessions on a single canvas, each printed painting is a record of contact with multiple supports whose marks, as prints, are only partially transferred and largely preserved. Some fail as gestures; others get over printed. Those that become finished paintings bear the traces of these and the other finished paintings and vice versa.
The singularity of each work is thus destabilized (or extended) as traces proliferate and become a part of other works. Unlike Warhol’s silkscreens, the paintings are at once substrate and “ink,” receiving and transmitting multiple prints, and interrogate the potentials of both accretion and seriality.
These works relate to my other work in that they are attempts to find ways out of a labyrinth of antinomies—inscription and erasure, life and death, eternity and time. Like Theseus retracing his steps along Ariadne’s thread, they work backward to avoid the trap of syntax and treat duration as a process for arriving not at the answer but the question—for clearing space so that memory can emerge.