New Islands: Sylvia Fernández

Water immersion has an immediate physiological effect on the human body as oxygen is sent to the muscles and central nervous system, causing blood vessels to relax. In Sylvia Fernández’ paintings, a sense of merging, coalescing and mingling with the elements feels palpable, almost physical. In a frequent motif of a female form bathing in shallow water from the viewer/bather’s view in a half-filled tub or a shallow pond, time flows and slows, as if these figures have emerged like Selkies from a primordial sea. Breasts and knees sink or rise, alluding to New Islands, the title of Fernández’ solo exhibition at Tyger Tyger Gallery, as well as one of the anchor paintings within it. Across so many of the works in her show, water and rain surround human hands, birds, and pared-down, close-cropped nude figures. Grassy marshes, skies, clouds, and silhouettes fold in and out of both positive and negative spaces: there is no hierarchy here. Like Shakespeare’s Ophelia and many other literary and mythological female characters, Fernández’ figures merge with water, but they do not feel like they are sinking away from us—or from life. They rise into being as if we can relate in some way with their emotional world.  

Working with an elegantly limited palette of inky blues, greens and blacks occasionally visited by soft fleshy pink-to-orange, Fernández imbues each image with graphic, gorgeous edges that hint at the look of woodcut prints and preserve the lilting gestures of her hand. The images are purified, pared-down and magnetic. “I trust the process more than anything”, she explains in an interview published in Vigilance Magazine. “It’s like a pulse, it’s like a rhythm. Suddenly you are in it and you’re just going. It takes you away to another place, somewhere that you really feel good. And it’s not just the way it makes you feel. It’s where you end up. You find something that you were never aware of. Whenever I start to find connections, they are everywhere and I can just connect one or two, maybe by an idea and an image, and suddenly a story starts and it develops on its own. It might not even belong to me anymore.”

A layer of playfulness emerges in paintings like Nos unen los cielos/ Sky unite us, where two hands are positioned as if they belong to the viewer, raising up in a gesture of awe and praise towards a torso bordered in black that outlines a massive figure through which a flaming sky at sunrise. The hands themselves add to the dark edges to create an added contour that suggests abstracted breasts. It positions the observer into the mind of the artist, creating a mental framing of the figure that skews female. A series of faceless portrait silhouettes echo the René Magritte’s figurative works. They seem to stare back, as water becomes rain or teardrops in and around them, deepening the concept of what an island might be. Fernández’ looser paint language shifts from moody darkness to luminous wonder, navigating registers of memory, emotion, sensation, repetition, and distillation.