In the search for the place of my body: the end-development-end novels by Félix Fernández. 2006

Xosé Manuel Lens
Curator and crítico de arte


My body is arranged open, broad and controlled. It’s a topography which makes use of the wind to swing, of the periphery to dodge, of time, of soil, of that screen made on society in which I may exteriorise with my skin and attitudes. Each work carried out by Félix Fernández gather a place of the body in the map of society, of the outer side but from an inner positioning. Its time, recreational and constant, deceives and scatters in photographic, performance, video and installation works. And also in sculptures being fed from the deepest place of doubt, of life, of the tempest of an impossible to survive fall. Before finishing this text I possibly stop believing decadence is used as a monitoring profile; by now I enjoy thinking of the glitter of passion, of drama, I keep on breathing in blows while it is going down the curtain from a theatre where a defeat agent made his performance, narration doubt. The narration and the dramaturgy.

Today, not pretending to escape from a body art label, which can also be, we think about the critic writer who goes against the tide in that state that instructs the casualty’s best goal, in the open and fused impulse between both, the will to externalise and the will of plucking a personal language. Part by part, the body first, then the adjectives, the pronouns, the adverbs and the rest of edible conjunctions. Part by part; narrative fragments delivered in recreated instalments, ideas from a script projected in a controlled way whose only witness is my body. They are the positions, the readings and the interpretations are the second looks of this itinerary; today I place myself in front of the mirror while I observe myself behind it, while I examine my back. I become reversible in two different ways; Today I dig in a land owned by others, at night; Today I keep an eye on myself, armoured in the four cardinal points; today I imagine a white party to fight in a collective; today the map of my anatomy seems a black box hoping to be opened, strolling by the so-called creative career course. Perhaps today, again, the main character understands the reason for my doubts: where does uncertainty dwell?

‘By the arms, and also by the legs,
and, if it is not possible, by the head,
the camera picks up the moment.
What had made you stop looking at me?
By hits and audacity
Get it, get to the floor and drag me.
From the angle,
In the charming surface,
Following the cruel outline, get to the floor and move’

Virgilio Piñera. La Isla en peso

Damages, erosions, destructions, guilt and captures; neither wakefulness nor resignations. The reason of damages drinks from your vital signs; in your senses, in the myths you need to wait for: the narration, the poetry, the harmony of perfection or beauty. In its search dwells the direction of those who see you as an artist today. That is why Félix tries that everything is projected from the attempt, from that feeling of the ones who try to become, of the man who works daily while others place labels to cover, to get through. That is why perhaps we cannot think of individual works. And his work grouping in series make condense that apparently actual place mankind takes up in life and in life possibilities. The place and the human; the stage and the character. The artist and the occupation. I insist: there is time left to dodge labels and even other one that is not afraid of them.

We imagine an established script, Black boxes, from a sketch surrounding mankind action, its traces and secondary roles recorded and played from a sign (in concrete time and space) which is a stage design that opens itself in order to show its doubts and desires, causes and satellites that today while I write, walk or hit, nourish my body, my black box.
I think about my body from long time ago while I fake a wound on my nose and place myself on a bed with a woman singing or policemen guarding; I hit my neither tattooed nor marked body so that I can let that the things surrounding me today, where I perform, be the things that send messages to the audience. Without kisses for a suggestive environment. You surround your bed with iron pillars on its parts, forever fragmented, then you take back the same polarity for the installation of the trace, of the metaphor of fracture, of that guardless guard, without corners but now with building site fences. Feelings of loss, of storage and memory, perhaps not far from works by Félix González-Torres or Pepe Espalíu, in that detailed and impulsive meeting with metaphor, with the extension to the sculpture that recreates an experience. We can even pick Robert Gober not forgetting to label an absent, thoughtful body with dirty boots in the middle of a room, in front of a fan, while we listen.
“Body control represents an expression of social control.

The time of heroes and fixed and unalterable visions has passed away. Now we can only find subjects, sort of defeated and lacking certainty in search of new representations’
José Miguel García Cortés, Walks between love and death.

One of the reasons for my body to act comes from the narrative fact, in that shadow fragment that works move involving the viewer from literal and symbolic positions. That is why Black boxes refers to the plot of the abstract, of the group of works deliberately organised in order to become public, which are grouped together under a common denominator of the same signature; that in-between stage always used in the open ending chapters novel, as happens with diaries which are named to indicate the present time, pure present time. The plots by Félix Fernández stem from that personal field that evolves with the work on which those fates of margins almost featured, almost thrown are placed. The best displayed black box is always my body on which I place my doubts, my desires.

The White party, the celebration of the exceptional and the daily. The margins of realities that get filled with facts from the social field; They are those imagined fascinations from the apparently elegant, from a past recreated with music and atmosphere.

I travel across my guarded, armoured body. I travel across the outline of my life while I name each and every pole: east, south, north and west that draw the four parts that mark my outline. One, two, three and four parts; perhaps we think in the way Leonardo did reaching the human being proportions, perhaps in Klein’s taking the absurd, as Nauman, as fifth measure; neither great calculation nor great conquests are defined anymore. Measure, control, keep on being the side of my body demanded by society creating a shell, creating an image cloth, as before when playing the role of policemen in order to be observed, so that I could be armoured; I always have anatomy to try, never to reach, it remains as an essay, as a prototype.

The thousand ways of sleeping calmly which surrounded a photographic series were worth to conform, as we see, a strongly narrative will of an actor and his space. A context, always a place where the viewer’s look can be altered, but the protagonist is always the same. I check the looks on the body without puberty’s evidence but with the daily conquer of that who is fed with doubts and attempts and transvestites to get freed in that meeting with the graph paper of a body’s topography under the blankets, in front of the green landscape, near an Arnolfini married couple. Me with myself; me and my mirror project; me and my fiction. That is why we also go over the recovering of their bodies as materials, as sketch channels in Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, Dieter Appelt or Vito Aconcci, in John Coplans, Pierrick Sorin; in Álex Francés, Lucas Samaras or Ixone Sádaba.

We find our place in a non dominating space the same way we stir the search of an imagined book or dream of the search for a truth manifesto. The search for the place. Permanence, in that relationship of mankind with its time made land, with its search place. The catching of an answer, an explanation. That constant digging with the water reaching our knees while we keep on taking out sand and mud. Our back is hit by the ruins of the past that today is a stage design for the night. Ruins, damage; Our thinking of descent, of falling, of the digging on a land that picks us up to continue is not casual. That memory placed in the black box. The video witnessing this Permanence thinks of the look from the poetic side insisting in that month long narration while body and time, ruin and trace, when left itself to waste.
The works by Félix Fernández exist from the feeling of making a complex stage design; halos of a wider component. For that reason each show or installation is carefully examined to make grow higher the degrees of intention addressed to the viewer. This way, an isolated bed controls the viewer’s look from the very moment they enter the room. Then the visual bipolarity (body, water and sand) as in Armoured conforms the look only with the impatience game already beaten and the achievement of the beginning and end-beginning script. That reverse as in the video projections where a Goya style human fight is simulated on a horizontal mirror in the open surface. His works will be prototypes before sculptures, fragments and means, video players or set up monitors, or buildings to shelter.

I must admit that when I started writing this text I placed some books by my side so that I could look them up and let them warn me about their content. I wanted them to be my pillars in my search for some kind of vacuum. For, I must also admit, I identify Félix’s work with my preferred readings, with my daily obsessions which I, instead of making them photographs, remain looking for explanations in readings and facts. Because I think this narrator’s production is as those who make use of the body expression daily, as those who clean themselves, take a shower or have lunch thinking of the prolongation of the work close to life, to daily acts. After that, he deals with the cleaning off excesses and present it in a referential will, argued, critic and active; there it comes my morning reading, going over Goya and Leopardi.

“I let myself drop before the mirrors judgement.”
Carlos Negro. Héleris

Now see how the stage design made people think of masques and telluric membranes disposed on the truth! The full sincerity of this acting resides in the way of narrating from his own body, his own life spaces, his doubt arguments, his own works. Reconstruction in black, just as Reversible, get stuck to the work like a second skin in that duality of mirror and protagonist in the inner spaces; the fingerprints on the face, the strokes that drive me and identify me on the street. Finger and fingerprint, signature of the personal, reinforcement of the sincere intention.

Now see how your stage design knew about common places, being in this moment, while I look around the reversed intimate landscape’s colour black box, showing the exaggerated, altered side, the anti hero side of that who plays the main role in his own exhibition extending his own life and the experience given by the years. In objects in the self portraits room, in that self fiction that covered by biography, from Lugo, Viveiro, Celeiro and Madrid, covered by flesh and skin. Definitively, the stage design before exhibition, and fiction before writing, of the novel from some years ago, while and during 2006. Miradas Virxes (Virgin looks), Latitudes, Plugged Umplugged or Malas Artes(Bad arts); Feedback, Observatori or Lengua blanca (White tongue); refuelling stop remnants, in the art of impulses’s hostel. The black boxes as unavoidable aerial reference elements that keep the route memory, of a definite travel; they are nomad archives of unavoidable direction: save for the future. Today means present and the main character is my body that travels across places, uncertainty spaces, in that dimension marked by the places left to know, the experiences left to live, everything with the suspense of the fact of plaiting the lived things and those passed through; the body that dwells and doubts. In-between stage.

I thought of the present before, before, as an own particle which defines the beginning of these paragraphs written in pieces of desk, kitchen and library, corridor and window, surrounded by two cats and a walker who from now on finishes this days long chapter and thinks of an actor in the training period, articulating himself, rehearsing. Perhaps it is something obvious and easy to understand. Falling back on the food of the outline in order to knock on the immediate door. Perhaps it is the way Félix Fernández works, sincere project in process. An author who, by the way, was born looking at the north, where Lugo loses its solid ground line which I found one day in the afternoon on my way home coming back from a bookshop where I had bought an old edition of one of those books we always remember, Les fleurs du mal. That is why I always identify Félix with afternoons, always thinking that this narration, self portraits writer has something of a poet, something of against the tide murmur, of moved body, of broken narration, of art-life nomad. Attempts, maybe.

Texts about some video pieces of Félix Fernández. 2006

Carlos T.Mori
Curator


A new space

““Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury.”

Gospel of St. John, 19:40.

From an intimate game with the white blankets we can see the artist stripped and sheltered between those two flexible planes. The blankets divide the screen hiding and showing his body through the white cloth. Those flesh fragments, when merging with the folds, create images of organic landscapes in which the blankets caress him as wandering thoughts. The heart beat calms before the inner landscape abstraction, longing own worlds and intimacy. Metaphoric landscapes live together with subtle inserts of the image of a beach and sometimes, palm tree waste, moving him away from noise. Thoughts that suggest the visual route in the video between the folds made up by the activity of his stripped body.

The blanket’s textures are syntactic pauses.

The viewer, after witnessing the set, the landscape and releasing later, pays attention to the fragmented aspects through a way out which follows a guideline shown by the blankets. The artist, isolated between the blankets, seems a restless ghost or spirit; or a sick person who keeps away from the outside world; or a foetus that frolics longing the uterus, longing purity; and records itself as a sample of a self assent act. The space provided by the bed is treated as a way out hole, somehow claustrophobic but worthy for the artist/spirit/sick person/foetus as a way to be with himself in a self imposed and tranquillising isolation.
But this shroud of love and light when shared can become torture in loneliness for this keeps their smell, the traces of his body, the memory of a partner. As we have seen in previous works by Félix Fernández, the poetic traces are an excuse of social and emotional doubts. We can relate this work with both, his video entitled ‘Reversible’ in rapport with the fight with himself as a precious crisis and with his later work ‘Mimeomai’ where after the inner cleaning, the artist becomes one with the wild nature surrounding him.

Test #1: on creation

“Go back to your loneliness, brother, and take your tears with you. I love him whose will is creating something beyond himself and for it, he passes away".

Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’.

Taking the song ‘Karma police’ by Radiohead (and a text by Friedrich Nietzche) as a starting point, one summer day the artist improvised a dance. Still camera, static framing, his own bedroom. Dressed up with white pants and images from his personal archive. An own stored-memory-cleaning ritual: recordings of potential memories from his immediate environment which are never watched but when they are to be shared and forgotten.

In the video ‘TEST #1: on creation’ the artist finds out in his nakedness his inner space, both through the dancing and the inserts of outer landscapes in the way of feelings: a loose hose moving driven by its own water spurt, a storm which gets fragmented and progresses, the sea (the sea always as a metaphor for longing) and a burnt car being removed by the police. Both he and his recordings denote unstable moments. Moments which conform a search for the way which drive him to himself through some own sides discovered progressively.

Secluded to loneliness and lost in himself, for a minute, he demonstrates his right and strength to tempt such a task. curiously yearning for, seeing what the others can see through the pyres, the external strained moments which cross his personal dance, in his own body acknowledgement, in the act of creator. A fierce self demand giving everything he can and knowing it is not enough. But in his creation from intimacy as we could witness in other works of his, the worst enemy turning up will always be the same.

An individual fight for his own perfection and recognition in society where past experiences set the guideline. A lonely challenge and retreat, with his loving and creating, followed not long after by a reluctant justice. A silhouette, his own biography, which is never finished and is always doubt.