Dex Fernandez wanders through another chapter of life, moving from 22ESB75CC to 120. In his previous exhibition at the tall gallery, he chronicled an eventful two years of death, violence, and healing through a maximalist depiction of frenzy and limitless energy. A form of catharsis, he was able to push the boundaries of his art-making by visually capturing a sprawling universe. Reality would have to immediately begin though. Years pass by so quickly and this current exhibition perhaps becomes a sensing of sorts.
How are you in the current moment? How are you in the grand scheme of things?
Spectrum of So Far So Good is a reflexive moment. We are taken into a journey where we can enjoy speculations of a narrative made possible by transformation of figures and vectors that are both ambitious and deliberate. Sometimes viewers can be distracted by the artist’s vivacious demeanor, but Fernandez is deeply concerned with the formal and aesthetic qualities of his art. It’s exciting to see how the new works display high technical skill and thoughtful conceptualization. The contradicting position of exposing and cloaking becomes necessary for the storyteller to keep us off balance, a feeling that is both uncomfortable and exhilarating. As an artist who strives to always improve himself, the obsessive consistency is palpable. Still very much present is what writer Carlomar Daoana previously described as a “movement, dance, the impulse to connect and disengage... expanding from the streets, to the bars, to the hectic textures of cities, to the evolving spheres populated with flashing gizmos and signs and motifs—staggering in scope, unstoppable in its expansion, hypnotic in its repetitions.” Notice this time there is restraint, breathing space, a consciousness of being present.
“It is this mode of apprehension above all that governs the new deciphering that we have given of the subject’s relations to that which makes his condition.” This was written by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan talking about chance encounters—an aspect of repetition that interrupts. The artist’s ‘apprehension’ becomes an apparatus to spotlight the moments he tends to romanticize and memorialize captured from his chance encounters with people, objects, scenes, and energies. His current condition, preoccupied by his queerness, anxieties on and of maturing, fresh ventures and adventures, becomes a landscape for ‘the new deciphering.’ The two-dimensional works are animated; each artwork a cel. Characters enter the frame and the exits are another round of introductions. These artistic decisions and processes are laborious and intricate. They compel us to appreciate every chapter of existence; we reflect not only on the phases of the artist’s creative life, but our own as well.
Hope you are (also) in this spectrum of so far, so good.
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