GC4: A Walk Home

GC4 is an invitation, a new iteration, a joyful infestation.

After three chapters of growth, chaos, and transformation, Dex Fernandez brings Garapata home. GC4 goes back to how it all began — a return to the linear, unadorned walk at GC1, the first of Fernandez’s Garanimation project. 

It's a homecoming, and homecomings mean doors. Fernandez opens his own art space, where he is the one holding the key. In doing so, he opens a door to his past, walking Garapata back to the start, and at the same time opens new ones: for his art to keep evolving, and for the people who believed in him to walk through alongside him.

Garapata carries more than himself when he walks – he carries Fernandez’s story, and by now, the story of everyone who has supported it. With its many legs, Garapata is always on the move, always looking for the right place to land, feed, and settle. In that way, Garapata is a lot like us: complicated, restless, still searching for where we belong. 

If the earlier chapters were about Garapata moving through the world — Tokyo's neon streets, Art Fair full of strangers' drawings, traversing alone in Cairo Biennale, Pinto Art Museum’s “mating season” exhibit that mirrored Fernandez's own unfolding life — GC4 turns the lens around. 

Here, the show is made of 335 small portraits: close friends who've been steady fixtures, longtime supporters, acquaintances who left a mark. Garapata doesn't just walk through these lives anymore. Garapata infests them — colorful threads, loose lines, and abstract marks spill across each face, obscuring but never erasing the person underneath. 

These portraits are intimate. We don't see anyone in full — a partial gaze, a fragment of expression — but what comes through is warmth. Fernandez wanted the color and linework to evoke happiness. Rather than a clinical catalog of people, this is a celebration of them. 

Behind them all, a large Garapata mural spans the exhibit wall, serving as the backdrop against which every portrait sits. Fernandez isn’t just documenting these people – he is bringing them into the whimsical universe of Garapata. 

Across three prior chapters, people watched Fernandez grow. In this one, he turns around and shows us who grew with him. The people are the core of his art, and — as it turns out — the core of him as an artist too. This is Fernandez naming his tribe, and thanking them by opening the door wide enough for them to see themselves in it.

Coming full circle rarely means an ending. Fernandez is already the first to say the possibilities aren't finished. There could be another iteration. Another door. There usually is.

-Weng Cahiles