LUCE
by Luísa Salvador, June 2015
Lisbon, June 22nd, 2015, 4 PM. I enter Sérgio Fernandes’ studio to a long awaited meeting. The artist and his new paintings I had only seen before in photographed fragments on the internet.
LUCE is, now, the title adopted by the artist Sérgio Fernandes to his new series of works. Luce, from latin, light. Luminosity. Luminescence.
I went there already knowing about this possible title. I had the expectancy of meeting luminosity in his paintings. The result was not a deception. By invisible chromatisms at the surface, the paintings emanate light. Their colours are consistent and vibrating.
I was surprised, however, their scale and their atmosphere. The paintings, with variable dimensions around 200 x 170 cm, are imersive. They transport to another dimension.
A dimension of Landscape, but not a totally canonic one.
In the studio, we were talking about landscape painting and the skyline along the History of Art. Anne Cauquelin suggests in The Invention of Landscape, that it was contemporary to the invention of perspective, during the Renaissance. In the eld of Vistual Arts, especifically the Painting, the world’s representation receives, after the XVIth century, an antropomorphic formulation, showing what the Man sees and how he sees this world. Painting becomes “a window to the world”. At rst, the representation of Landscape is a view through the architectural element, namely “the window”, as it is confirmed by several pre-Renaissance Annunciations, gradually occupying the whole picture.
Landscape becomes an autonomous pictoric theme. What once was punctual becomes the whole canvas, the limit of painted surface to be considered “the window” per se.
And perspective introduces a hierarchic view of what is framed by the window: the Landscape. Notions such as “vanishing point” or “horizon line”, associated to perspective, are closely related to these landscape pictoric representations.
To Sérgio Fernandes, these are well-known questions. An investigation on visual perception, starting from the point of view of the composition of what one aims to represent, and also an investigation on the genesis of chromatic spectre itself and the reason why we should see certain hues at different moments of the day.
At first look, the conventional horizon line seems to be absent in this series of atmospheric paintings. One, however, feels asured it is always there. Even when it is not visible, the artist starts from it to develop his preliminary watercolour sketches.
His work invites us to think about the possibility of a theoretic and historic formulation about the horizon and about the hierarchy of the look, but without the line itself being evident and depicted. To think about the atmosphere, the chromatic execution allowed by the invention of oil paint, Leonardo da Vinci’s sfumato, the same atmospheric sfumato growing towards autonomy on the canvas, until it becomes itself a pictoric theme.
Wouldn’t it be the same thing we see in works by J.M.W. Turner or Constable? In our talking, we have also mentioned Mark Rothko. All of them are masters of chromatic formulations on canvas. Creators of atmosphere. Or only exquisite copyists of daily atmospheres?
This series of paintings, LUCE, presumably originates from several places and different moments of the day as perceived by the artist.
His work emanates his own views and experiences. I ask him about the movie Mr. Turner (2014), directed by Mike Leigh, if he has seen it. Yes. The movie faithfully depicts the atmospheres Turner used to paint at dawn. Turner captured the yellow, the golden and radiant hues of the day at the beginning.
LUCE, by Sérgio Fernandes, also captures daylight atmospheres, but mainly the in nitesimal moments of the end of the day, the evenings and sunsets, in graduations of blue, indigo, violet and orange. Sometimes the painting comes from his memory, from moments he was not allowed to paint it out. Sometimes are moments seen from the window of his studio, from that cozy sanctuary where is possible to lay down and see what the artist sees.
The paintings by Sérgio Fernandes transport us to all these atmospheres. They could be only views from his window, framed in a traditional landscape formulation. But their dimensions and scales, their apparent absence of horizon, the vibrating chromatic work convert them into authentic portals to other latitudes.
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