Museum of Anthropology and Contemporary Art (MAAC)
The artistic production of Fernando Varela is defined by a vastness of symbolic and spiritual references, which could refer to the contemplative, but at the same time it is a lucid challenge to the abulic and linear thinking of contemporaneity as it continually contradicts it. Each of his canvases or papers poses a perennial spiritual, social, ideological and consistent question, as the container of these reflections is art: aesthetic.
In Origins, there are a number of layers of analysis and critical nodes. At first glance, the set of works appears to us as a succession of almost taxonomic studies. Each of the pieces is a very distinctive classificatory deepening of a specific event or object. The artist presents it as “formal searches that transform into increasingly intimate and symbolic investigations.”
The works in this series rhythmically follow the succession of a timeline. Each stroke, superimposition of gestures, or layer of pigment seeks to reveal another time, imperceptible to those who cannot track it.
“The origins tell of development in cosmic time; they provide a graphic representation of the origin of form, space, and time,” Varela correctly states.
In the pieces of Formas' Primarias a process of contrast and revelation occurs. The artist proposes a parallel and logical continuation of this rhizomatic discourse where the idea of light as a revealing instrument of realities or truths has great preeminence. The continuity and sequence of the oval shape developed in repetition, from the pictorial craft, is emphasized by the use of monochrome and chiaroscuro... light as a tool. From time to time on the canvas or paper a point of darkness is evident that functions as a point of resistance, and therefore, a turning point for the development of the other forms that compose it.
Sara Hermann
Historian and Art Critic
