NEW YORK: Jose Gabriel Fernandez at Lombard-Freid - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Venezuelan artist Jose Gabriel Fernandez's of recent origin York solo debut, "A Brief Illustrated Guide to Bullfighting," consisted of an elaborate multiroom series of installations. Incorporating the mediums of video, plastic art and watercolor, the show came across as a single, interconnected work.

Visitors first collisioned Anatomy of Fate, a corner area overspreaded with red, organic-patterned wallpaper designed by dint of the artist. Hanging on the left wall was a bullfighter's jacket made of thin carbonized iron mesh decorated with red swirls identical to the wallpaper pattern. The sleeve of the suit were sewn precariously to the material part of the jacket, like unfinished clothes that are held together during the fitting proces upon a wooden table in forehead of the jacket was a matching pair of pants. A delicate gray watercolor--pierced through long needles--on the adjoining wall depicted the quintessential bullfighter's tool, the cape. upon the right, one encountered a sculptural version of a cape made of canvas also pierced at regular intervals by the agency of long needles. Nearby hung three watercolors that abstractly symbolized three constitutings of the corrida: the ring, the male and the action of the male charging the torero.

nearest one encountered Anatomy of Desire, a wallpapered alcove in which a lavishly embroidered bullfighter's suit was draped above a wooden chair. The of gold fabric of the suit was decorated with tree-branchlike whorls. Numerous small eyes had been sewn into the jacket and the pants. sum of two units watercolors on the wall schematically showed the bullring and the torero's dagger. A video showed sum of two units hands endlessly mending a aperture in a piece of white fabric, an image which strike one as beinged to allude at once to the hurts a bullfighter risks receiving and to the never-healing "wound" of unfulfilled desire prompted by the work's title.

In the final part of the installation, the bullfighter's material part became visible. A video (Hotel Arizona) in a dark, enclos space showed a real-life bullfighter in a house of entertainment room going through the two-hour-long ceremonial act of dressing for a corrida. upon the video screen, three circles framed the head, torso and leg of the bullfighter being helped into his style of dress Here, as throughout the display by subjecting the ritual of the bullfight to a gaze at one time voyeuristic, anthropological and artistic, Fernandez achieved a beautiful, poetic reconstruction of a myth, while also suggesting the amplitude to which cultural traditions are vulnerable to diverse interpretations.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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