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Lot Essay
“My characteristic images and themes are objects from an unreal world of aggression and conflict,” Fernández once explained, “in which mechanical parts appear together with anatomical ones, under the surgeon’s scalpel, under the introspection of a curious mind, and in certain tormented zones.” The piercing, psychological intensity of his paintings conveys “a great deal of alienation,” he acknowledged, even a tortured “angoisse métaphysique” that materialized in the trauma and early self-reckonings of his exile from Cuba, which began in 1959 (“I am a Painter of the Brush…,” Agustín Fernández: The Metamorphosis of Experience, Milan, 2012, pp. 48-9). Fernández came into contact with late Surrealism while in Paris during the 1960s, and his palette shifted from the melancholic color of his Cuban years toward intimate shades of beige and then into a cool, black-and-white aesthetic that combined geometric forms with suggestive sadomasochisms, his work—including the present Untitled—engaging with contemporary hard-edged abstraction and Postminimalism. This painting was included in his most recent solo exhibition, Agustín Fernández: Armaduras, which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami in 2019.
The black-and-white paintings defined the terms around which Fernández oriented his practice following his move to New York, where he spent the last three decades of his career, in 1972. Their conjunction of (part-)bodies—erotic and psychosomatic, diasporic and national—anticipated the transgressive body politics of later series and brought him into the orbit of the emerging Downtown scene. “In New York, I found again the vitality of art,” Fernández recalled, and he began to site his practice within the punk-bohemian and queer counterculture of the East Village, a connection later deepened through his close friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, whom he met in 1979 (“Curriculum Vitae,” c.1970s, Agustín Fernández Foundation Archive). Working in series, he explored sexual taboos and constraints, probing visceral and metaphoric anatomies—of armor plates and anacondas, butterflies and femmes-oiseaux—with ardent and unflinching intensity. Encompassing “a metaphor of belts, pieces of armor or machinery, binding strings, cutting knives, and violent actions that plague the body and mind,” his painting, in his words, “represents an oneiric reality in which man is besieged by a number of forces that surround him: eroticism, mechanical civilization, the elements of war, as well as other conflicting impositions” (“I am a Painter of the Brush…,” op. cit., p. 48).
The present Untitled belongs to Fernández’s iconic series of armaduras, begun in 1973 and varyingly reprised throughout his career. Articulated in slender, interlocking bands, the armor is layered within a square, geometric grid that curves to accommodate a tumescent body that descends from the top of the canvas and emerges at its center, revealing a single metallic breast. Sublimated and monochromatic, the painting’s edgy intimacy—conveyed through a psychosexual iconography of desire and restraint—undoubtedly reflects the period sensibility of 1970s New York. Yet the armaduras also manifest the pain and vulnerability of the Cuban body, their mechanics of eroticism enacting a private and deeply national allegory of exile.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
The black-and-white paintings defined the terms around which Fernández oriented his practice following his move to New York, where he spent the last three decades of his career, in 1972. Their conjunction of (part-)bodies—erotic and psychosomatic, diasporic and national—anticipated the transgressive body politics of later series and brought him into the orbit of the emerging Downtown scene. “In New York, I found again the vitality of art,” Fernández recalled, and he began to site his practice within the punk-bohemian and queer counterculture of the East Village, a connection later deepened through his close friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, whom he met in 1979 (“Curriculum Vitae,” c.1970s, Agustín Fernández Foundation Archive). Working in series, he explored sexual taboos and constraints, probing visceral and metaphoric anatomies—of armor plates and anacondas, butterflies and femmes-oiseaux—with ardent and unflinching intensity. Encompassing “a metaphor of belts, pieces of armor or machinery, binding strings, cutting knives, and violent actions that plague the body and mind,” his painting, in his words, “represents an oneiric reality in which man is besieged by a number of forces that surround him: eroticism, mechanical civilization, the elements of war, as well as other conflicting impositions” (“I am a Painter of the Brush…,” op. cit., p. 48).
The present Untitled belongs to Fernández’s iconic series of armaduras, begun in 1973 and varyingly reprised throughout his career. Articulated in slender, interlocking bands, the armor is layered within a square, geometric grid that curves to accommodate a tumescent body that descends from the top of the canvas and emerges at its center, revealing a single metallic breast. Sublimated and monochromatic, the painting’s edgy intimacy—conveyed through a psychosexual iconography of desire and restraint—undoubtedly reflects the period sensibility of 1970s New York. Yet the armaduras also manifest the pain and vulnerability of the Cuban body, their mechanics of eroticism enacting a private and deeply national allegory of exile.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park