Enrique Fernández Cervantes / ARTIST STATEMENT | > Español

Perceiving Art
I am unable and disinclined to resist the allure of art.  Some would say that essential human necessities entail, in general terms, the need to eat, to rest, to love, to protect, and to subsist. Not many people, however, would add to this list the act of sensing art as an indispensable infuser of human sustenance. And yet, I know many a person to whom the mere proximity of art brings the sensation of a type of nourishment that goes beyond the physical and the spiritual.  The experience of art is hard to explain.  It is an indescribable tingling feeling; it is an unexpected surprise; it is the discovery of something never seen before or the recognition of something long forgotten. It is a peculiar perception of the visible and the invisible, indeed. 

Keen perception of the intangible is not an exclusive virtue reserved for fortune-tellers, saints, or those blessed with premonitory sixth senses.  An admirer of art also possesses such sensitive perception.  This ability is perhaps learned or perhaps innate.  Perhaps both. We all are drawn to the things that put a smile in our faces or to things that make us think.  We are attracted to anything that stimulates our imagination and senses.  We want to be touched, moved, and affected. Viewing art gives people such gifts.  It is in the nature of art to do exactly that.  If people gain so much from perceiving art, just imagine how much fulfillment would come from not only viewing, but also from creating art.  From being an admirer of art, I moved to making art early in my life because, like many, I also sought to acquire that singular sensitivity that seizes you and never lets go.  How can one resist to such powerful force?

ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

Developing and Evolving as an Artist
My artwork is an improvised tool I use to tell stories. Sometimes, the stories come out right; other times, they are transformed, altered, interrupted, or made to disappear in order to give life to other new stories.  Telling stories is an unpredictable process.  I am deeply inspired by the tradition of oral history, storytelling, and magic realism. Many times, my art merges realistic portrayals of ordinary events and elements of fantasy and myth. The material that inspires my work transforms the common and the everyday into the fantastic and the unreal and creates in the process a rich, often perplexing world that is at once familiar and dreamlike. Stories of this type are an important inspiration for my visual artwork.

My overall art style is hard to categorize as it encompasses several creative approaches.  The type of media I explore and use ranges from drawing, painting, photography, graphic design, collage, assemblage, and, occasionally, site-specific installation art.  In my projects, I use these media alternatively enjoying the freedom of choosing whether I want to concentrate on a single medium or instead combine different media and styles to produce a more complex and hopefully a more interesting artwork. I think it is to an artist’s advantage to be versatile and learn to experiment with as many materials as possible so as to make himself a more complete artist with the flexibility and resourcefulness that comes with being a multi-disciplinary creator.

The great majority of the artwork I create is of figurative and narrative nature.  My subject matter changes as that of any other artist, but the figure is an important and recurring element of my work.  Growing up in Mexico City, I was exposed to a great variety of art forms.  Mexico City is a city that places a great value on its culture and arts.  In that city, you can find groups of artists and educators who are dedicated to preserve ancient cultural traditions and artistic heritage. But you can also find other groups who are learning and adopting the ideas and methodology of new Avant Garde artistic trends from the evolving global artistic community.  Artists in Mexico learn the importance of recognizing the value of the artistic past while, at the same time, staying current and even innovating in the field of art.  Growing up in that type of environment has influenced my artwork to this date.

Artists are always being influenced -- whether they are aware of it or not -- by the work of other artists.  In a classroom setting or in the professional art world, artists learn to study and produce side by side with other artists in an environment that is conducive to artistic collaboration and exchange of ideas.  Students learn from the teacher and from each other.  Artists also learn from history and their environment.  Artists whose work I saw in books or in galleries and museums have influenced my work.  Artists whose work has never been shown in books, galleries and museums have also given me inspiration.  I admire the figure drawings on ancient Greek vessels and the religious mosaics from the Byzantine era. My inspiration is not limited to only those ancient artists, however, as every day, it seems, I continue to find new artists—from the past and from today--that influence my work.  I simply enjoy the process of creating a piece of art, no matter what methods I utilize. 

As a visual artist, I am excited to live in these times of progressive art innovations, global artistic exchanges and technological advances.  The possibilities to express oneself as an artist today are indeed overwhelmingly infinite.  The potential to establish significant connections in the world community comes hand and hand with our new global proximity and is exciting and unprecedented.  The creation of art in our modern times is perceived and morphed in many forms: as a sharing resource of culture, as a vehicle of echoing human expression, as a reason to engage in competition or collaboration, and, perhaps more importantly, as an priceless instrument used by many in order to become servant leaders and humble communicators of life experiences happening everywhere, locally, regionally, and internationally.    What a wonderful time to be alive.  What a blessing is to be a participant in the continual exchange of worldviews.  What a great time to be an artist and a storyteller.

Calvino uses words that join together the real and the invented by creating a unique world where tangible reality coexists with allegorical, magical and surreal elements.  This interaction between reality and fantasy is imbued in Calvino’s stories and in the works of some writers and artists from Latin America who have been labeled as Magical Realists.  Magic Realism merges realistic portrayals of ordinary events and elements of fantasy and myth.  This artistic genre, which began as a predominantly Latin American literary movement and has extended to the visual arts, transforms the common and the everyday into the fantastic and the unreal and creates in the process a rich, often perplexing world that is at once familiar and dreamlike.  Art of this type is an important inspiration for my work.

The director of the puppet show induced in the mind of the public visual images that were at the same time marvelous and intriguing. However, she did not paint the whole picture to us.  Instead, she presented only selected fragments of Calvino’s work that stimulated our curiosity and desire to know more about the fantasy-filled stories of the writer. Sometimes, artists deliberately do exactly that: they choose not to excessively analyze a particular subject, even if they have the knowledge and the competence to do so.  They simply explore the subject to a certain degree and give the public the task to examine, decipher and understand the information contained in the art.  Artists communicate ideas and the public interprets those ideas and, at times, is touched by them.

I am not an expert in anthropology, sociology or any other science, even though my work many times reflects issues related to those areas.  My experience and knowledge in those fields is very limited.  I am an artist and my main objective is to communicate.  Like many other artists, through my art, I tell stories that are not quite complete.  For example, in the literary world, Italo Calvino created Xlthlx and Georg Büchner wrote about his character Woyzeck.  Juán Rulfo made up Pedro Páramo and in the same manner Carlos Fuentes invented a man named Artemio Cruz.  I like to create characters and make up names for them, too.  Only, instead of appearing in text, my characters exist visually in my paintings and photographs.  Sometimes, even nameless characters live in my artwork.  Some of them dwell in places with non-existing addresses in the company of other characters or in complete isolation. When I paint and take photographs, some of my themes are constant while others take different directions.  Some stories complement each other and a few of them stand on their own.  My artwork is a collection of stories that have no theme in common.  This makes it challenging to label my artworks or to place them within specific categories. Just as some people prefer to read about a variety of subjects, I also like to create images that explore multiple ideas and issues.  I want to fill my works with color, light, abstraction, magic and some mystery in the same way that the director of the puppet show and the artists and writers who I admire have done.

My paintings and photographs are the tools I use to tell stories – both the ones that have been written already and the ones waiting to be invented.  I feel that a great part of my own self gets immersed into my images.  It is gratifying to me when someone – a “reader” of my stories- finds in my work a little part where they can also see themselves represented.  Perhaps, they can find themselves in the work or maybe they can find characters from stories they heard in the past or stories they invented themselves.  When that happens, everybody involved in the process has brought about a meeting of never-ending stories that are told and retold many times in many places by those who have an interest in the vocation of storytelling.