dexfernandez.com: GARAPARTY

GARAPARTY

Walking alongside Dex Fernandez is a struggle to try and catch up with his pace. His feet shuffle to a different kind of tempo -- frenetic and furious. In “Garaparty” we see the footsteps of an artist constantly whirring with energy, not knowing when to stop or what stopping is.

Last year, he spent two months at a residency program at Fine Arts Work Center in Massachusetts and then another four months in New York for immersion and exploration. In the midst of the sticker tagging he did was the constant partying. Along with his partner in crime, they would leave Manhattan at around 10pm for another borough. Some nights, they would be in speakeasy bars and in a new acquaintance’s house party the next day. By 2 am, he would be slumped at a seat in the subway, feeling calm and satisfied after a night of debauchery. The experience has made a great impression on him and couldn’t shake it off. Being back in Manila, he felt boxed in. He took to the canvas what he left in New York – the wanderings, the risks, the feeling that every night the world is bigger.

He recalls the contradictory nature of his nights of partying, that despite the throbbing noise, the mass of bodies crammed in a single space, he is able to find his form of nirvana. This is the result of his head on collision with New York -- a natural high where everything becomes compressed into a needlepoint of blankness. He lets himself experience the process naturally so he could go through the transitions of the peaks and plateaus. In that moment, there is a transformation. He feels himself mutate as he escapes.

Here we see Fernandez’s works embark towards a different route. We are familiar with Garapata as monochrome creatures, legs splayed, seemingly always on the move towards the next place of infestation. Steering away from the signature monochrome figures, we see a new exploration in the explosion of color and chaos. The large Garapata paintings are overblown projections of what is inside when we dissect a parasite so small. We see its inner working, that it could contain a vast universe of plankton-like patterns, hallucinatory helixes and variations of Garapata. Inside is a network of vessels thick and thin, heartbeats stopping and starting, and bloodstreams filled with neon. All seven paintings magnify the transformation that happens inside a person when he escapes. The racing pulse. Beads of cold sweat on the forehead. Dilated pupils. The smallness of these changes is projected onto large canvases so we could face a portrait of a man going through changes night after night.

To create a complete visual experience, Fernandez collaborated with Willar Mateo, the man behind Salad Day, to create pieces of clothing for the exhibit. The outcome is a capsule collection that captures the psychedelic and trippy nature of Fernandez’s art. The pieces became another vehicle of Fernandez’s NY experience as the details, patterns and colors evoke the iconic Garapata style. Nothing is lost in the transference into another medium.

When asked if he could be without Garapata, Fernandez has actually imagined that future. But for now, he is focusing on its evolution, stretching canvases and imagination to accommodate further possibilities.

Texts by Weng Cahiles

Paintings