10. Diffraction as Sensory Experience

Voices multiplied in echoes that are their own aspects; fractured and recomposed structures that give way to movements and transformations; object-events that are constituted in the changing plexuses of relations that they establish with their physical and symbolic surroundings; installations that become places and experiences; geometrical designs that are filled with waves and sinuousities: Magdalena Fernández's works are events in which sensible formulas (the normalized chords of sensibility) are unsettled thanks to the use of light, to the way in which light (its reflections, projections, flashes, reverberations) becomes an instrument, a tool and utensil, drawing a setting or some images that have an impact on their own conventions; thanks to the way it is made into an artifact—objectified—modifying space or being installed as an apparatus by composing situations out of which important changes in sense and orientation are established. The incidence or absence of light shatters and transgresses the ordinary arrangement of spaces, and also the foreseeable development of the image.

This use of light is one of the fundamental elements that enables Fernández to construct a sensible geometry, a vitalist abstraction that incorporates process, the mechanism of "being-being" [el estar-siendo], into the logics of rationality because light and the manifestations it generates are precisely the mode of being of the existent, always halfway between plenitude and loss. Indeed, diffraction—that which for abstract logic turned the sensible into an equivocal instance, into a problem, emerges in these works as the potential of the sensible itself: its possibility of connecting memories and events, its possibility of turning spaces and images into presences and places, its possibility of making itself out of the unforeseeable.

SP

Magdalena Fernández's diffractive approach corresponds to addressing a sensitive, sonorous experience that moves away from the self-referentiality of representation to configure the entanglement of experience with the sensible. Diffraction and reverberation reflect the artist’s interest in exploring the visual and sonorous aspects of an artistic experience through a sensibility that challenges the order of abstraction to value the agency of nature emerging onto the surface of her installations. Side-lining the logic of form, vision and speculative thinking, her work draws on the dissolution of form and image to value the potency of scattered, elemental, elastic forces, resonating with a rhythm of life. Between absence and presence, the virtual and the real, interferences and motifs, energy and the graphic sign, diffraction pertains to an affective mode of apprehension towards nature that is intended towards its pure logic and internal necessity. This can be read in 2Ipm009, wherein the crossing of vertical and horizontal lines diffracts into a multiplicity of signs that dissolve and reposition themselves on the surface of her works. Through diffraction, Fernández allows the play of signs to be configured through rhythm and the chance of new formations. The diffractive lighting suggested by Magdalena Fernández reinterprets abstraction and extends it towards the synthesis of multiple orientations, mirroring a natural order emerging from the substrate of experience.

SB