Leon Tovar Gallery

For this year’s presentation at Master Drawings New York, Leon Tovar Gallery celebrates the highly experimental and Surrealist-informed style of represented artist Agustín Fernández by presenting a selection of large scale works on paper. The Artist practiced drawing alongside painting throughout his long career. Neither preparatory studies nor sketches, the aesthetic qualities of black graphite on white paper nevertheless informed the stark contrasts found in his paintings of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Taken as a whole, Fernández’s body of drawings is an expansive repertoire of mark-making techniques: rhythmic, lashing strokes; washes of diffused graphite; and heavily worked, darkened moments, all working to construct mutable and unnamable objects that inhabit the dream-like space of a largely untouched ground. The deft modeling of his drawings allows his forms to seemingly float before the page itself, as if hanging in a state prior to language and law.

In an unpublished text on Fernández’s drawings, the curator Donald Kuspit has likened the vast expanses of white paper to the space of the unconscious, the black graphite-standing against this backdrop, or emerging from it-the images of the conscious mind. That the dark forms seem independent of the white paper “makes them more ‘outstanding,’ so that they seem completely objective and autonomous, but it also suggests that they are subjective illusions, hallucinations in the white desert, and as such soon to collapse into its emptiness, all the more so because they are eccentrically constructed, and as such inherently unstable.”