Fernand Fernandez is a total artist. Which means he also writes poetry and plays music, but mainly he paints, every day –since always. Although we do use some categories such as expressionism, outsider art, or sometimes art brut, we generally fail to name his painting. Which doesn’t matter because once we get close to Fernand’s figures they start to be revealed to us with their own vocabulary –the way he says he likes to reveal them.

His powerful work, which strikes each of us by its constant silent shouting, using either black or colors but far from any skill to tease or easily please, mainly allows us and helps us to time travel until the evidence of being alone, being together, being mixed –or just being. Even if during this trip we are never alone. The Dylan’s “I Contain Multitudes” could have been the title of many Fernand’s recent paintings. While less recently “I” was mainly trying to hear and understand his own voice.

Fernand sometimes speaks about himself as an artist who would have been led to study under pressure. We don’t know if his work would have been different without those long years at school. Although he says that during those studies in both Letters and Art he did nothing but exercise his faculty of wandering and his capacity to act for nothing, his not-learning way has led him to his own high production of forms, in both fields –together with a special sense of irony and a productive way of discarding what is learnt or what should be right. So that it seems fair to say he has managed to use both studies and pressure to reinforce the artist.

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Corinne Lovera Vitali