Portfolio: Sylvia Fernández
Amanecer contigo / Dawn with you, 2023, oil on panel, 20 x 16 in.
[Image description: A painting of a human silhouette with an expansive sky of vivid blue in the center.]
Sylvia Fernández (b. 1978, Lima, Perú) explores the boundaries of her own humanness, as an embodied animal whose existence is intertwined with the natural environment around her. In Fernández’s Serie del desierto / Desert Series (2023), layered images of the body and elements of the landscape reverberate to form multifaceted compositions. Across the entire series of ten oil paintings, Fernández works in two octaves of representation; the first presents humans and nature intimately meeting, while the second blends the two as a single entity.
Serie del desierto emerged after Fernández spent time in Joshua Tree National Park. She calls this time in nature “an exercise,” a term that sheds light onto her exploratory approach to making. What she notices is how she researches; her practice is grounded in awareness and sensation. Fernández is in her forties, but as an artist she simultaneously embodies the qualities of a wise elder and a small child filled with wonder. Remarkably, in our digital world, she is able to easily disconnect from technology and be present in the material world, transfixed by details of her surroundings that many of us in the middle of life overlook. In the desert, she noticed the way the wind touched her skin and the delicate sound it made washing across the open space. She noticed the scale of her limbs in relation to the expansive sky. She noticed the bold contours of the rocks and the infinite prickles of the cholla cacti. She noticed herself reaching out to meet the desert, to fit herself into the story of the landscape.
Back in her studio, Fernández conjures what she absorbed during her time in the desert and translates it materially through oil paint. The first piece in the series, Amanecer contigo / Dawn with you, portrays a silhouette of her own head, simplified as to appear vaguely feminine yet nonspecific. Instead of a face, the form’s interior opens to a vast, cloud-streaked sky. The surreal composition brings the viewer into Fernández’s psyche—there is a collapse in the divide between mind and body, the psychological and physical. She takes herself and her setting as subject matter, but does not intend to create a traditional self-portrait. Rather, Fernández crafts a sense of deep intimacy between herself and the outside world.
Huecos / Holes, 2023, oil on panel, 14 x 11 in.
[Image description: A painting of a sand-colored rock formation with a dark crevice in the middle that resembles the shape of a pelvis bone.]
Fernández’s approach to painting is sequential: a finished piece serves as something new to which she can respond. A subsequent painting, Huecos / Holes, presents a rock formation that simultaneously appears as a pelvis. Here, Fernández creates a unified composition, in contrast to the previous celestial piece, in which two distinct realms uncannily converge. Her use of oil paint in this second work is lush, the edges between light-beige tones and dark shadows soft and confident. In Huecos / Holes, there is no separation between the body and nature—they are entirely the same. The viewer may even have the self-conscious feeling they are anthropomorphizing this rock formation by subjecting it to such a corporal read, when in fact these concave spaces exist in flora and fauna all around us.
Escuchando al viento/ Hearing the wind, 2023, oil on panel, 12 x 9 in.
[Image description: A painting of a dark blue hand in motion against a sky background.]
A later painting in the series, Escuchando al viento/ Hearing the wind, is aptly titled. This small painting depicts a hand in the air, its shadowy form and the deep blue sky behind it evoking dusk. Fernández’s quick, wide brushstrokes blur the image and convey a sense of speed and sound. It feels as though the painting makes a “woosh” noise, like when you ride a bike, fast, and the wind’s force reverberates in your eardrums. Fernández’s technical skills allow her to evoke temporal and sonic qualities that add to her content’s symbolic meaning. The hand is an entry point, a boundary of the body, the first physical point of connection to meet and greet the new or unfamiliar. Escuchando al viento is one of six paintings in the series to feature a human hand.
Caricia del desierto / Desert caress, 2023, oil on panel, 30 x 30 in.
[Image description: A painting of abstracted hands and eyes enmeshed in a dry landscape made with beiges, greens, aquas, and blues.]
In five other works, Fernández’s hands are positioned in relation to cholla cacti, the midday and evening sky, the sandy earth, and a desert flower. Each time, there is a scale shift of the embodied or imagined human in relation to these various natural elements. In Caricia del desierto / Desert Caress, the brushy outline of two hands float, camouflaged, in the center, as if wrapped around an invisible waist. The entire panel is covered in a taupe of both cool and warm notes. Knots rendered in the curves of the sandy dunes evoke the irregularities of tree bark, as well as open and closed eyes. Here, Fernández’s work not only disguises the body, but through her portrayal, something as familiar as the ground beneath us appears anew.
Tocandote, flor nocturna del desierto / Touching you, night desert flower, 2023, oil on panel, 14 x 11 in.
[Image description: A painting of a neutral but multicolored flower surrounded by a midnight blue sky and the outline of two blue-black hands reaching towards its center]
Caricia del desierto’s ambiance is so ethereal that it seems not to exist within the 24 hours of the day. In contrast, time of day is palpable in Tocandote, flor nocturna del desierto / Touching you, night desert flower. It is the darkest of the paintings, with a blue-black border converging around a hazy pinwheel of khaki green, aqua, and peach accents. In the foreground, an even darker navy outline of hands reaches out towards the flower. The negative space between the fingers mirrors the shape of the unfurled petals, creating an illusion in which the hands reverberate between presence and absence. Tocandote, flor nocturna del desierto is intended to be the closing of the series, leaving us to contend with what is fleeting, intangible, and sublime. For Fernández, to be human is to see yourself through nature, to be interconnected enough that the layers blur and the in-between space that divides “us” and “it” wilts and withers until it hardly appears at all.
—Lizzie Zelter, artist and participant in the 2023 HereIn Writers Workshop