Magdalena Fernández: Obra abierta

November 21, 2024 – January 11, 2025

Monotypes, drawings, paintings and a rod installation occupy the space of the Galería RGR, evoking a model of work production like the one the semiologist Umberto Eco conceived in the early 1960s: the “opera aperta.” While the work of art mirrors the variables and contingencies of its context, the history, language, gender, sexuality, ideology, and culture, for Eco only the material of art can offer the appropriate information to the form it adopts. In this sense, every work of art, both past and present, is open.

The artist Magdalena Fernández —trained between Caracas and Milan during the debates on postmodernism and post humanism— embraced the practice of abstraction against the current, and has since undertaken a tireless renovation of the historical materials of geometric abstraction and constructivism, through a slow, precise, and delicate work. To this end, Fernández has confronted the vicissitudes that come with undoing the bodies of sculpture, painting and moving images, with the intention of building real or virtual spaces. In her practice, science and art are often interchangeable terms. Her approach to three-dimensionality explores negative space and the vector and interstices that unfold and open the work of art to polysemic dimension. According to Norma Morales, engraving teacher at TAGA —graphic experimentation workshop where Fernández has developed several monotype series, — “the flash, reverb and cloudscape are present phenomena” in the artist’s research, who has translated them plastically into drawing.

The exhibition prepared by Fernández for RGR’s 2024 program closure includes a group of splendid works which, on the one hand, research the trajectory of moving bodies to the point of disintegration, and on the other, invite the public to create a poetic field in an open work were all meaning is possible.

Gabriela Rangel