Frame and Rupture, Inscription and Displacement: The Limit Between Space and Object in the Work of Magdalena Fernández
The broken line that runs through the plane’s diagonal midsection seems to slide sideways. Adjacent to yet another line that mimics but displaces it, the diagonal appears to move within the space that opens up between itself and its double. That space is minimal, restrained –the site of a tightly contained flicker that spreads out over the whole surface, as the same procedure of displaced duplication has been applied to the remainder of the work: twice pressed, each time in a slightly different position, against fragments of a single structure in relief, the white sheet of paper appears to the viewer as the support of a pulsating construction.
To perform the described act of reinscription, Magdalena Fernández has used the first work in a series of “surface modulations” that Lygia Clark produced in 1957. The procedure is significant in both a formal and an historical sense. For the line that Fernández breaks down and displaces sideways, thereby creating visually elastic gaps within the plane of paper, had been understood by Clark as an internalization of the pictorial frame –a frame broken and reinscribed, by means of incisions on the plane, within the work’s fractured configuration. Fernández returns to Clark’s formal thinking in order to intensify it. She exacerbates the rupturing, enlivening, and therefore “organic” effect of Clark’s line. Yet by reinscribing and displacing the structure of a modernist work, Fernández also produces a material allegory of her own research, driven by the interest in reconfiguring Latin America’s modernism in ever renewed ways.
The monotype in which Fernández remodulates Clark’s work belongs to “GM,” a series of white-on-white pieces that includes another modernist construction: a poster by A G Fronzoni, which the artist also reinscribes and reinterprets from a contemporary point of view. Like Clark, the Italian designer resorted to the line in order to articulate an elastic geometry –a geometry that compels the plane to generate an unstable, collapsible, even reversible sensation of space. And once again, Fernández retraces the rupturing rhythm of that instability by actually subjecting the plane to the pressure of volume, whereby the ambivalence between projection and recession, strictly perceptual in Fronzoni’s poster, takes on a material condition.
Writers on Fernandez’s work have remarked on this aspect of her research:the interest in objectifying optical sensations within a space that is itself conceived as a constructed object informs, in their opinion, the artist’s installations1. The forest-like threading of 1i011 provides the most recent example. Rather than being the static elements of a rigid geometry, this construction’s fractured metal bands swerve when viewers exert pressure on them. As they oscillate and regain their precarious equilibrium, such elements redraw the space where they are perceived –a space that briefly stops being the empty gap that exists between the metal bands to become a shifting body, an object madeup of tensile spatial relations.
Yet just as it is important to remark on how the installation’s elements objectify space—an observation applicable to the artist’s hanging “Mobile Volumes”, the open frames of which might equally reshape slices of emptiness—the converse operation has also a critical significance in other writings on Fernández’s work: space extracts from the material condition of these pieces the deobjectified traces of their movement2.
It would therefore seem more fitting, when addressing the work of Fernández,to demarcate a zone of intermediation between object and space. Detectedand named “non-objectivity” by critic Ferreira Gullar in relation to neo-concrete art, such a liminal zone would in theory resist the strictures of rigid material conditions—those, for instance, imposed by the framed limits of either pictorial plane or object—so as to allow experience to disperse and recombine itself within a multilayered, multisensory medium. The novelty, both critical and enriching, of Fernández’ approach to the theoretical platform of neo-concrete art lies in her use of video to create elastic articulations of planes dividedby yawning gaps–the internalized transmutation of the frame into the dynamic force of a process of continuous (re)construction (1pmHO008LN, Homage to Hélio Oiticica).
It is also through video that the artist plans to reshape the glass façade of the addition to the Caroline Weiss Law Building that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed, in 1958, for Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In this case, the medium of video will allow Fernández to unleash a process of dispersal and recombination intended to disrupt the perception of the building as a fixed, circumscribed architectonic object–an object opposed to the fluid, constantly shifting condition of public experience in urban space (1ip011)3. As she had done with Clark’s and Fronzoni’s structures, Fernández’s new project would follow a logic of duplication and displacement: interspersed channels of video would be used to project onto the façade’s glass panes the structural lattice that sustains them; at first coinciding with the tectonic grid, the projected lines would then proceed to expand and contract, thereby making of the façade— the building’s framed face—a shifting, elastic body capable of remodulating the relation between city and construction, between space and object.
Juan Ledezma
1 See Luis Pérez-Oramas, “Lo casi visible,” in Magdalena Fernández (Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto, 1997), and A.G. Fronzoni,
“Magdalena Fernández Arriaga,” 1993.
2 See Elisabetta Pozetti, “Magdalena Fernández Arriaga,” in Steellife, 2009.
3 The letters “ip” in the title of this work in progress stand for “intervención pública” (public intervention). This new aspect of the artist’s work corroborates her intention to achieve a structural integration between art and architecture. Thus the project is the prototype of a yet unexplored way of linking art and everyday life, which is also a critical continuation of Latin American modernism’s ideals.
Biography
Solo Exhibitions
2012 "Grises: un proyecto de Magdalena Fernández", NC-Arte. Bogotá, Colombia •"2iPM009", MOLAA, Museum of Latin American Art. Long Beach, CA, USA 2011 "Mobile Geometry", Henrique Faría Fine Art. NY, USA • "2iPM009", Frost Museum. Florida International University, Florida, USA • "Objetos Movientes. Atmósferas - Estructuras -Tierras", Centro Cultural Chacao, Periférico Caracas / Arte Contemporáneo & FARIA+FABREGAS Galería. Caracas, Venezuela 2010 "2iPM009", en el marco de "Complete Concrete", Haus konstruktiv. Zúrich, Suiza • Site specific 1i010, Residencia de la Emabajada de Francia. Caracas, Venezuela
2006 "Superficies", Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. Caracas, Venezuela • "Surfaces", CIFO: Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. Miami, USA 2000 "Líneas", Galería Pedro Cera. Lisboa, Portugal • "2i000" Galería Disegno Arte Contemporanea. Mantua, Italia • "4i000" Museo Alejandro Otero. Caracas, Venezuela 1998 "Aires", Sala Mendoza. Caracas, Venezuela 1997 "2i997", Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto. Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela 1996 "1i996", Centro Verifica 8+1. Venecia-Mestre, Italia 1993 "Estructuras", Sala Mendoza. Caracas, Venezuela 1991 "Aspettando la parola". Municipio de Castiglione delle Stiviere, Italia.
Selected Group Shows
2012 "Diálogos Contemporáneos desde La Colección", Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. Caracas, Venezuela • "Contaminados", Sala Mendoza. Caracas, Venezuela • "Histórica: Memoria y territorio: Colección Mercantil", Espacio Mercantil. Caracas, Venezuela •"Venezuela en Arts", Bienal de Marcigny. Marcigny, Francia • "GEGO obra Abierta: Testimonios y Vigencia", Museo de Arte Contemporáneo. Caracas, Venezuela • "Medios y Ambientes", Museo Universitario del Chopo. Ciudad de México, México 2011 "Moment", Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto Scarborough. Toronto, Canada 2010 Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo ULA-2010 • La Nuit Blanche 2010, NMarino Galería. Paris, Francia • "Venezuelan Pavilion", HotShoe Gallery. Londres, Inglaterra • "Negativa Moderna", Henrique Faría Fine Art. Nueva York, USA • "Neoplastic Room. Open Composition", Muzeum Sztuki w Lodzi. Lodz, Polonia 2009 X Bienal de Cuenca "Poéticas del agua". Cuenca, Ecuador • "Mundos en proceso", 53ª Bienal de Venecia, Pabellón de Venezuela • "Steellife", Trienal de Milán, Studio Chiesa, Fundación Marcegaglia. Milán, Italia •"Acciones Disolventes", Centro Cultural Chacao. Caracas, Venezuela • "Space, Unlimited", Art Museum of the Americas. Washington DC, USA 2008 "Intangible", ArtBo 2008. Bogotá, Colombia • "El lienzo es la pantalla", Caixa Forum Palma. Palma de Mallorca, España 2007"Double Perspective, Contemporary Art in Venezuela", Bolivar Hall; Maddox Arts. Londres, Inglaterra • "El lienzo es la pantalla", Caixa Forum Barcelona. Barcelona, España • "I Bienal del fin del mundo". Ushuaia, Argentina 2006 "Drawing papers" Analog Animation, The Drawing Center. New York, USA 2005 "13 instrumentos de dibujo", Fundación Corp Group. Caracas, Venezuela • "Ingravidez", Museo Jacobo Borges. Caracas. Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Zulia, Venezuela • "Arte Contemporáneo Venezolano/1990-2004 en la Colección Cisneros", Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia / Centro de Arte Lía Bermúdez. Maracaibo, Venezuela 2004 "Light and atmosphere", Miami Art Museum. Florida, USA • "Arte Contemporáneo Venezolano/1990-2004 en la Colección Cisneros, Museo de Arte Moderno Jesús Soto. Ciudad Bolívar, Venezuela • "Levitas", Galeria Disegno. Mantua, Italia 2002 "Geometría como vanguardia", Museo Alejandro Otero. Caracas, Venezuela •"Paralelos, Arte brasilero de la segunda mitad del siglo XX en contexto Colección Cisneros", Museo de Arte Moderno de São Paulo / Museo de Arte Moderno de Rio de Janeiro, Brasil2001 "Instalación para Agape-Fuori Salone", Ex-acciaieria Riva. Milán, Italia • "Cittá sottili. Luoghi e progetti di cartone", Chiostri di San Micheletto. Lucca Italia • "IV Bienal Barro de América Roberto Guevara", Museo Alejandro Otero. Caracas Venezuela / Memorial de América Latina, São Paulo Brasil 2000 "L´ Art dans le Monde" Pont Alexandre III. París, Francia • "Parque de la Amistad Israel-Iberoamerica". Natanya, Israel 1999 "56º Salón Arturo Michelena", Ateneo de Valencia. Valencia, Venezuela • "Amérique Latine, Caraibes: une nouvelle génération d´Artistes", Passage de Retz. París, Francia • "Public Art In Italia", Viafarini. Milán, Italia • "VI Bienal de artes visuales Christian Dior", Fundación Corp Group. Caracas, Venezuela 1998 "De discretas autorías, Cuba y Venezuela: nuevas poéticas", Museo de Arte Mario Abreu. Maracay, Venezuela 1997 "La Invención de la continuidad", Galería de Arte Nacional. Caracas, Venezuela • "I Bienal do MERCOSUL". Porto Alegre, Brasil 1996 "VIII Premio Mendoza", Sala Mendoza. Caracas, Venezuela • "Alegorías al Jardín de las Delicias", Museo de Artes Visuales Alejandro Otero. Caracas, Venezuela 1995 "11 Artisti a Pépinieres", Openspace. Milán, Italia.
Awards
2009 Premio X Bienal de Cuenca "Poéticas del agua" 1999 Señalada por la crítica como mejor artista extranjera en el IV Foro Atlántico. Pontevedra España • Premio único VI Bienal de Artes Visuales Christian Dior. Caracas, Venezuela 1998 Premio Arturo Michelena, 56º edición. Valencia, Venezuela 1996 Premio único, VIII edición Premio Eugenio Mendoza. Caracas, Venezuela 1992 Premio en la Competencia Internacional de Afiches: "Man, Nature, Society" Moscú, Rusia.
Private Collections
Fundación de Museos Nacionales • Galería de Arte Nacional • Museo Alejando Otero, Caracas, Venezuela • Colección Mercantil, Caracas, Venezuela • Colección Cisneros, Caracas, Venezuela