Rafa Fernández

Rafa Fernández - Portrait

Technique: Analog photography

Artist Biography: Originally from the city of Liege (Belgium), where he was born in 1966, Rafa Fernández has a long career behind him, he has worked for years with "Espacio Foto" (Madrid) and "El Arte de lo Imposible" (Gijón). 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.

 

"Leaving reality behind." Rafa Fernandez as a visual chronicler presents us in this series a new sketchbook of reality. Tokyo is, on this occasion, the scenario where unpredictable images follow one another, almost found. Intoxicated by the elegance and glamour of American documentary filmmaking of the 50's, he presents a series of timeless black and white photographs, pursuing that moment found in the center of this protagonist world, Tokyo, its culture and its people. But it is in this series where Fernández abstracts from the physical and the obvious to look beyond: an aesthetic intention of cleanliness that leads him to purer images. Interested in the traces of the lives that make up this city, his interest is that the viewer finds tranquility in a preconceived image as a chaotic city, altered by movement, lights, noise and masses. Fernández's traveling lens, capable of revealing the ephemeral and spontaneous, crosses borders and allows the viewer to know a little more of this metropolis so different from our West. Text: Angélica Soleiman