Teresita Fernandez at Miami Art Museum - Miami

In her installation last season at MAM, Teresita Fernandez continued her minimalist reveries upon the art and idea of landscape. above the past several years she has exhibited at short intervals in the U.S. and abroad; her novel pieces tend to evoke the uncompounded bodys of light, shadow, water, collection of vapors and foliage, and their ordering in space, which have enchanted gardeners and painters for centuries. She signals her contemporary viewpoint upon this long tradition by using late 20th-century synthetic materials, clearly revealed and juxtaposed. When she is greatest in quantity successful, as in this work, her visual catchwords skillfully evoke our powerful memories of landscapes we have experienced in the two nature and art. Magically, we can imagine a cluster of plastic cubes as a mist or a surface of glass beads as a shimmering pond

For MAM, Fernandez designed an oval space At varying levels on its curving white walls fluttered amorphous configurations of small acrylic cubes, plant more densely at the center and thinning without at the edges. The transparent cubes were colored solitary on their back sides in several shades of amethystine so that they seemed to float just in forehead of the wall's surface. upon the floor, two irregularly curving platforms were overspreaded with literally millions of tiny, clear glass spheres [i]or[/i] part of to the other which were refracted dappled shapes of light and shadow. The general result of the piece was of softly shifting atmospheres and reflecting surfaces: rather cold sensual, serene and conceptually rigorous.

Fernandez, like many artists before her, engages in a dialogue between artifice and nature. In considering the history of this dialogue, Seurat's lyrical, atomized landscapes as well as Monet's paintings of water lilies present the appearance especially relevant. In her pensive contribution to the discourse, Fernandez recalls Monet's oval swings lined with water-garden paintings at the Orangerie in Paris. Monet made these installations with a generous confidence that they would serve as a security and refreshment for harried urbanites. Fernandez, using a of recent origin vocabulary of forms and materials, also creates artificial environments that generously make a place for connecting to nature in imagination. Evoking neither the awesome storms and threatening avalanches ofttimes associated in the literature of landscape with the masculine "sublime," nor quite the "beautiful" version of nature, unassuming and domesticated, that has been associated with the feminine, Fernandez erects a nature that has a contemporary, synthetic beauty in which femininity is imbued with toughness.

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