Museum of Modern Art (MAM)
Although, according to Jean Baudrillard, art has become iconoclastic today - but a modern iconoclasm, which no longer consists of breaking images but of manufacturing them, with a profusion of images in which there is nothing to see; images that literally leave no traces, without aesthetic consequences, survive, outside of this trend, in his general view, an art committed to its time and its own destiny. This is the case of many artists who, inside and outside our context, venture down the less easy path. Their works are the result of their experience and personal search, which leads them to create forms that make up realities full of meaning.
In the works of Fernando Varela we find that constant, which defines the work as a way of self-knowledge and access to the transcendental and from the spiritual dimension of art, he seeks to transcend the limits of sensible reality, to find answers to questions that seek to be resolved from his philosophical study of reality and being, connecting with that current of thought that emerged with the historical avant-garde, which has in Mondrian – an artist he is interested in and studies – one of its greatest representatives and who understands art as an inquiry of the absolute.
In fact, art is for Varela a way of life, and the act of creation is a necessity that has led him since his beginnings to constantly reinvent himself in a perfect balance – conceptual formal – between abstraction and figuration, between construction and deconstruction, achieving through the stubborn reiteration of forms, representing and transmitting their vision of the world and their ideas regarding their surrounding reality.
En Orígenes y Formas Primarias, alude, a través de elementos básicos, al principio de todas las cosas, a su origen primigenio. Desde su madurez conceptual y estilista y con maestría técnica, parte formalmente del punto como elemento mínimo de representación, para formar la línea que cobra forma ovoide y se repite constantemente como elemento preciso e inagotable.
Tal precisión del dibujo, se extrapola al cromatismo sobrio y escueto, que expresa, a través de esa paleta reducida y sus cuidadas composiciones, lo que entiendo su búsqueda de la perfección. Una perfección referida a la propia obra, a la naturaleza y a la creación.
Recreated spirituality that, as a leitmotif, is reiterated throughout more than three decades of artistic production, and that takes shape in this corpus made up of thirty-nine works, which make up this exhibition, in which the greats expressly predominate. formats.
Origins and Primary Forms, is therefore an anthological exhibition, which collects some of his most recent works and was born with a traveling vocation, in an attempt to cross the borders of time and physical space, to position itself internationally in the right place that belongs to it. : as one of the most important contemporary artists in our country, allowing his works to be not only witnesses and testimonies of the time, and a reflection of his inner world; but also a vehicle that connects him with the reality that surrounds him, expressing his “philosophical and mystical reflections.” Those that underlie the depths of the spirit, combining in these two series, symbology, graphics and mysticism, with works, which in their own words, “start from the point as the origin of the entire universe, creating new forms that return to the origin, and like this, until eternity.”
María Elena Ditrén
Director of the Museum of Modern Art Dominican Republic
