NICASIO FERNANDEZ
Out of Hand
Artist Reception: July 25th, 6-8 PM
July 26th - August 19th, 2023
He went for the Guston. He stayed for the Wautier.
Last July, Nicasio Fernandez made a pilgrimage to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to see “Philip Guston Now.” In past interviews Nicasio has cited the 20th century painter as one of his primary influences, most notably evident in the younger artist’s depiction of hands as well as his use of cartoon-like imagery to convey deeper universal truths.
As Nicasio explored the museum, he stumbled down a corridor - almost by accident - and came across five modestly sized canvases hung sparingly apart which appeared to be from a Flemish Old Master. Upon closer inspection, the wall text revealed the paintings were by the largely-forgotten 17th century artist Michaelina Wautier.
“‘The Five Senses’ struck me visually as this very compelling imagery. I was so impressed with her confident mark-making from how the clothing was constructed to her overall playful, witty and dark sense of humor,” recalls Fernandez. “This sensory idea was relatable and transported me into her time and place. I knew from standing in front of Wautier’s paintings that I wanted to respond. I wanted to push these moments into the poetic absurdity that my own work is built upon.”
What if Jim Nutt made op art? How common are upturned noses? Is the Cartier Crash a real watch?
These are the kinds of questions I find myself asking - and even Googling - while looking at Nicasio Fernandez paintings. Pensive, joyful, horrified, perplexed: his figures run a gamut of emotions and temperatures. They shape shift from leading man to comic foil to inner child depending on what capacity the artist needs them to operate. Knowing that his new exhibition was a dance among the senses, my first impulse was to ID which painting represented taste, touch, smell, sight and hearing. I soon realized that Nicasio wasn’t going to make it so easy. Where Wautier painted a boy playing a flute to mark the auditory, Fernandez depicted a guy screaming as his bowl of spaghetti strangles him. The title of the painting “Mama Mia” might also double as a musical reference to the 1970s Abba disco anthem. After taking in the remaining six paintings, I decided that, in fact, this painting was a stand-in for “taste” and that “Zip It” was Nicasio’s ode to our ears. This aforementioned painting shows a central figure with Gnoli-like hair having their face zippered up into a Z by some disembodied green hand. The lack of sound possible here resonated loudly. It recalled John Cage’s 4’33” performance conceived in 1952 where the composer sits at a piano and proceeds not to play a single key for that prescribed time allotment.
So then what of sound? I turned my attention to Nicasio’s painting entitled “Overworked.” Against a bright red wall we see a saw stuck in a wooden table being bent back at such a severe angle that the teeth begin to crack along a middle seam. The implied anthropomorphization here echoed the pictures that Lee Lazaro made of tools in the 1960s where a hammer or vice grips appear to be fighting for their own agency.
“I feel something that has an on-going presence in the work is the usage of certain type of violence. This derives from my interest and growing up on Chuck Jones, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera cartoons and later finding out about Peter Saul’.”
The ability to conjure plausibility from wildly unrealistic scenarios was a quality which spoke to a suspension of consequences. Certain types of violence can transcend the physical realm and produce room for introspection.
“Give Me A Wring” is the most dad-joke of all his painting titles in the new exhibition. A contorted figure is squeezed for every last drop into an awaiting glass below and yet the subject appears to have nothing left to give. The old idiom about blood-from-a-stone comes to mind. Foregrounding this action against a wavy purple and green test pattern further enhances the sensation of being twisted to a maximum degree. Again the disorienting nature of such circumstances fits naturally into an extrapolation of the physiological, offering a hint of the sometimes frustrating undertaking that self-expression can morph into.
Obviousness is a concern that Nicasio Fernandez takes active measures to avoid. To that end his realization of “sight” as one of the five senses is particularly straight forward even if the gaze comes at you sidelong. Not every sense needs to be buried so deeply in a grander narrative. “Peering” arrived almost subconsciously for him from watching old James Bond films and seeing the cut-away close ups of 007 hiding from bad guys. The cinematic dovetailed with Nicasio’s childhood memories of playing man-hunt, trying not get caught by peering around the corner. While revisiting that memory, the artist had a sensory recollection that the walls in the neighborhood were made of cheap rough stucco which would fall off in chunks if you kicked it or peeled it off. This sense of touch where the figure’s hand has weight, but can feel airy against the sandy textured impasto imparts actual visual grittiness.
My favorite painting amongst this new series has the aura of a Lisa Yuskavage landscape, that full-frontal hit of nature in bloom and the smell of petrichor. “Taking a Moment,” much like the Windows ‘95 background, conveys this idyllic vastness of lush green grass and cool blue sky with an evading horizon line at a remove. When things are not going according to plan and are overwhelming we often forget to stop and smell the roses or in this case the single flower in a whole empty field. Sometimes we can be so sidetracked that we lose sight of the now and being grateful for what’s happening around you. -Bill Powers