Exhibitions > Recent Works 2009
Distric & Co. Gallery
The “Recent Works” by Fernando Varela are a demonstration of mastery and freshness combined. A purposely minimalist title, without a guiding key and stimulating open reading.
We thank Fernando Varela for presenting at District & Co, a gallery specializing in contemporary art, a set of drawings, paintings and sculpture, at once reliable in volubility and coherence, in concept and craft, in diversity, knowing how to conserve the elements –figurative, lyrical and/or neo-abstract- that make it unmistakable.
The work generates a strategy of progressive and ascending contemplation: if any painting seems airtight at first glance, an unknown fascination does not allow us to move away, and as we integrate into the atmosphere and its pictorial – or graphic – components, we decipher, interpret , we participate... We find a conceptual approach and purpose, apart from formal seduction. This exhibition, simply called “Recent Works” but which we consider a “brief anthology” of Varelian expression in recent years, has been very well selected. Let's not forget Fernando's experience as a “Curated Curator”, which he knows how to apply to his own work…
The viewer – intelligent and sensitive – a necessary but sufficient condition – appropriates this combination of intensity, intimacy and mythologization, never innocent and consciously seductive, which, at the same time, elevates the spirit. Well, today like yesterday, Fernando Varela ignores what is gratuitous and superficial. For years committed to the sublimation of being, then “geopoliticized” with the fate of the insular Caribbean, he manages to produce an iconography of eternal typology, but situated in the present, concerned with life, nature, the state of the world and its perspectives…in danger of extinction.
The exhibition. Here the emblematic work is an installation of white crocodiles, “cloned” in sea salt, on which they also rest. Threatened species, weaker than devouring, went through millions of years, but how many more will it survive?
The three-dimensionality, the monochromaticism, the naturalism turn the three beasts into announced victims, an allegory of lives without a future, apart from the fact that it is a beautiful reincarnation.
Fernando Varela continues to be multidisciplinary, the sculptural aspect differing, even in style, from drawings and paintings. Furthermore, for a long time, as a contemporary artist, he has rejected the idea of “progression” in his work. He explores different modes of creation, working in series. The exhibition at District clearly reflects this process: there is a mutation of languages with a broad self-definition, although always with a strong aesthetic content.
It is important to emphasize that, even in the same technique and theme, it is not repeated, it varies and enriches. This faculty of self-renewal is particularly affirmed in Lettrist paintings. Now Fernando Varela “takes the floor”, and in two languages that are exchanged, if not interact in semantics and message. When he writes “Black is white” and vice versa, he alludes to the restlessness of a contradictory world, hammering it from his consciousness to ours, in different sizes, colors, dispositions. The diversity of the tools intensifies the ideological discourse.
It is the same voice – a kind of obsession – that is anguished by the problems of man, his environment, his individual and collective destiny. The paintings and drawings, where the figure and the body take center stage, express it, in an almost lancinating way; The character, necessarily anonymous, is still enclosed in an unusual sieve, but can float, ascend and escape... Furthermore, Fernando Varela, who usually uses mediated ranges, with low and insinuating luminosity, introduces a bright, greenish, purifying chromatic variant. A hopeful space for creatures and nature in their different kingdoms, which share the pictorial territory.
“Recent works”, a deliberately minimalist title, without a guiding key and therefore stimulating an open, personal and restless reading, stands out as an excellent exhibition, where each work is justified and has its place. Fernando Varela is one of the greatest artists of the Dominican visual scene.
Marianne de Tolentino
Today Newspaper
Director of the National Gallery of Fine Arts
