Rafa Fernandez

Rafa Fernández - Portrait

Técnica: Analog photography

Biografía del Artista: Originally from the city of Liège (Belgium), where he was born in 1966, Rafa Fernández has an extensive career behind him, having worked for years with “Espacio Foto” (Madrid) and “El Arte de lo Imposible” (Gijón). He has also had solo exhibitions at Mediadvanced (Gijón) and at the SegoviaFoto Festival at the Palacio de Quintanar. He has been part of numerous collective exhibitions, including those of several editions of the Hablando en Plata Festival. His latest collective exhibition El gran libro del mundo. Una década de fotografía en Asturias was presented at the Juan Barjola Museum (Gijón) in April 2021. Also in 2021 he inaugurated American Way a solo exhibition at the Antiguo Instituto Jovellanos in Gijón. In her work, photography and travel go hand in hand. Her words are definitive in this regard: “I have read that Annie Leibovitz remembered the long car trips with her family, going to the different destinations of her military father. She commented that the frame of the car window was her frame long before she had a camera in her hands. The same thing happened to me, through the window of my father's Beetle I got used to seeing the world as we crossed half of Europe from my native Belgium to return to Asturias for vacation.” Although he has travelled widely around the world and has notable works from countries such as Japan, his weakness is the United States. Perhaps it has to do with his varied musical and artistic references, all of them directly linked to this nation: jazz and blues; the photography of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston, among many others; and the hyperrealist painting of the second half of the 20th century by authors such as John Baeder or Richard Estes.

"Leaving reality behind" In this series, Rafa Fernández, as a visual chronicler, presents us with a new notebook of reality. In this case, Tokyo is the setting where unpredictable, almost found images occur. Intoxicated by the elegance and glamour of American documentary film of the 1950s, he presents a series of timeless black and white photographs, pursuing that moment found at the centre of this protagonist's world, Tokyo, its culture and its people. But it is in this series where Fernández abstracts himself from the physical and the obvious to look beyond: an aesthetic intention of cleanliness that leads him to purer images. Interested in the traces of the lives that make up this city, his interest is that the spectator finds tranquility in a preconceived image of a chaotic city, altered by movement, lights, noise and masses. Fernández's traveling lens, capable of revealing the ephemeral and spontaneous, crosses borders and allows the viewer to learn a little more about this metropolis so different from our West. Text: Angelica Soleiman