The day after +1
by Magda Delgado, 2014
In a former franciscan convent from the XIIth century, those were the academic spaces where Sérgio Fernandes’ paintings had their origin, in the eternal succession of artists’ generations. On the heavy walls there were laid on, here and there, layers from years of several students’ works. It was in this fertile environment, fertile by the humus of accumulated images, where I met Sérgio’s work as a colleague. Soon it started my curiosity and so I began following each one of his steps, whenever I could, watching him at his studio and his modus operandi.
In his studio, I have always seen large formats, buckets of paint on the ground, primary and secondary colours, black and white, several canvases being made at the same time and, a certain percentage of paintings hanging on the wall, when he then decided to take it out already finished, but still needing to be framed. I have never seen him afraid of damaging what was already done, the painting was eternal until he felt it finished, in spite of external approvals. Each painting had a considerable history of layers, such as the walls of our faculty. It used to start very early, before the classes, his duel with the canvas.
From huge spots of dripping paint, there were elements begining to take linear shape, by brush, becoming thinner and thinner, resulting afterwards on graphisms done by oil bars. This series The day after +1, by oil, is a result of an apparent crossover between drawing and painting. His use of oil, in tubes, fluid and applied by brush, articulated with oil bars, as a tracing material, has for the first time equal prevalence.
The freedom of gesture I have always admired has here its prime: curiously, almost in a dilution between fluid and dry materials. The author’s passion for Nature brute forces manifest itself in a sort of expressionism of the acting body, and also in a dreamy imaginary that becomes sharper and sharper along the time, located between pure abstraction, gestualism and symbolic representational elements such as birds, rain and unconscient things, almost as a psychic automatism. These images are pre-word communication directed towards a base to which we have access and, the small hands, considering the scale of the works, are the messengers of a power-collector-being’s ipseity. Sérgio is a complex data accumulator, fascinated by the Universe and its powers, and there is where his juice to Painting comes from. He uses the same body to paint large surfaces, and to infiltrate among high waves, fearless, as he is in his canvas.
In that sense, here is present a Romantic esthetic in a Expressionist materiality, Gestualistic, abstractizing. The Painting becomes ritualistic, a kind of dance in a trance, an exhausting one. The body defines itself as mandatory vehicle, by the traces it leaves behind, the hints it gives out in the width of vigorous gestures on the canvas, under the form of graphisms. The amplified rain crossing the window of the painting are created by
a man who materializes them, facing the weariness of labour.
The width of lenses I see in this series changes our scale before a Nature even larger. Simultaneously, it amplifies the effort of heaving with an arm gesture, while painting a canvas, a colossal raindrop pouring from heaven.
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