Rafa Fernández

Rafa Fernández - Nashville Spring Service (Nashville) - 2017

Biography of the Artist: With origin in the city of Liege (Belgium), where he was born in 1966, Rafa Fernandez enjoys an extensive career behind him, he has worked for years with "Espacio Foto" (Madrid) and "El Arte de lo Imposible" (Gijon). She has also had solo exhibitions at Mediadvanced (Gijón) and at the SegoviaFoto Festival at the Palacio de Quintanar. He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions, including several editions of the Hablando en Plata Festival. His last group exhibition El gran libro del mundo. A decade of photography in Asturias was presented at the Juan Barjola Museum (Gijón) in April 2021. Also in 2021 he inaugurates American Way solo exhibition at the Antiguo Instituto Jovellanos in Gijón. In his work, photography and travel go hand in hand. Her words are defining in this regard: "I have read that Annie Leibovitz remembered the long car trips with her family, traveling to the different destinations of her military father. She said that the frame of the car window was her frame long before she ever held a camera in her hands. It was the same for me, through the window of my father's Beetle I got used to seeing the world as we crossed half of Europe from my native Belgium to return to Asturias for vacation." Although he has traveled much of the world and has notable works from countries such as Japan, his weakness is the United States. Perhaps it has to do with his varied musical and artistic references, all of them directly linked to this nation: jazz and blues; the photography of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston, among many others; and the hyperrealist painting of the second half of the 20th century by authors such as John Baeder or Richard Estes.

 

INVITATION TO TRAVEL "We discover after years of struggle that we don't make a trip: it makes us. Guides, programs, reservations, obligatory and unavoidable things, sink and wreck in the personality of the journey." John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America, 1962 Gautier said that the pleasure of the journey consists in going, not in arriving. Rafa Fernández conceives the journey as such, as an experience in which the important thing is the route traveled and collected through photography understood as a periegesis, not written but visual. His snapshots reconstruct a personal American topography of human types, street scenes, roads, automobiles, gas stations, cafeterias, hotels... An inventory of the territories traveled. Carmelo Vega, in his essay Lógicas turísticas de la fotografía, reflects on how the photographic practice and the travel experience go hand in hand: "Photographic journeys were conceived as journeys of truth: the photographic image thus reconstituted the image of the world. To photograph was to see again. But, in addition, to see in an orderly way: planning and structuring the gaze like a file, methodically placing things in their place, pointing out their exact location, determining their importance. In short, cataloging places, cultures, individuals, objects". To travel is to know. In 1960, John Steinbeck discovered that he did not know his own country and, together with his dog Charley, began a long journey through the United States. In Rafa Fernández's travels his companion is a Leica M6 that seems to shoot to the rhythm of blues or jazz. Steinbeck himself wrote that "a journey is a person in itself; no two are alike". And so it is in his photography. New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Memphis, Nashville and Coney Island, among other places. Each with its own personality, its own temperament. The American Way series moves the viewer's imagination to the American planet through images that are nourished by musical, literary, pictorial (from the hyperrealism of John Baeder or Richard Estes) and, of course, photographic references. The echoes of Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Garry Winogrand, William Eggleston... The list is as long as "long are the journeys that America requires" in the words of Stephen Shore. Text: Natalia Alonso Arduengo IMAGE: American Way / Centro de Cultura Antiguo Instituto Jovellanos, Gijón / 2021