1. Echo

An echo is a voice—or an act of speaking—that multiplies itself to become several voices, disaggregating and appearing virtually in different places and situations, traveling through different positions and which, for this same reason, would seem to abandon the unique moment of locution and expand outward in the world. It is a voice—or an act of speaking—whose reverberation would seem to engulf and appropriate space, moving incessantly as if striking up a dialogue with itself, alluding to itself and unsettling itself, answering itself. In an echo, unity or oneness—a single sound or a single word, for example—opens up, making manifest its different tonal possibilities, and the framework that emerges from those variations—from the sequence of "echoes"—makes oneness denser, complex.

Magdalena Fernández's artwork deals with becoming, with the movement and constant transformation that constitutes the mode of being itself of all that exists, including both nature, bodies and materiality on the one hand, and the spirit, its abstractions and ideas on the other. Therefore, her installations, videos, sculptures and drawings are forms, figures or structures that grow and develop, that move about and change, and in that sense, they operate as "echoes" in which nature reverberates in the realms of the ideal and the abstract. Designs (drawings) turn into bodies, expanding and appropriating spaces; light propagates itself, conquering forms and tonalities.

This "being given as an echo" occurs, moreover, in two senses. First, her works are the "echo" of her intimate, prolonged experience in and with nature, as well as in and with the abstract tradition of the modern visual arts. In these works, nature shows itself—and is proposed—as a refuge and destination of existence, as the inescapable substrate that gives way to the world as it is thought and constructed. For its part, the abstract tradition is inscribed as the form and poetic "matter" out of which the works' acts of speaking are woven, calling upon memory, experientially interweaving distant times and places. Nature resounds in simple formal elements; the abstract tradition reverberates in the figures that serve as the works' "visual medium." Thus, for example, in 2iPM009, what happens is precisely the experience of "rainfall" in the rhythmic and growing transformation of the gridded lines and sounds, a rainfall that is the signifying container of the work—its speaking—and it is also the plenification of its presence. This "rainfall" is, additionally, an "echo" of the geometrical destructurings of nature that Mondrian elaborated, an "echo" that modifies them entirely. Whereas Mondrian carried out an abstracting process, Fernández goes down the path of naturalizing the abstract elements with which she constructs an installation that appropriates the totality of the space, completely absorbing the spectator.

On the other hand, within each work, the different elements making them up operate as "echoes" of each other, contributing different planes of meaning to the piece. Structural "unity"—that is, the artwork—is diversified, due to the multiple dialogical connections established among its parts. Therefore, within each particular form, figure or structure (each artwork), the different elements—planes, lines, points—are turned into the graphic and/or volumetric expression of complex systems of forces and tensions, in which an element propagates itself and gets modified through repetition in all the others.

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The landscape of Magdalena Fernández’s work immerses the viewer into the very essence of artistic experience in search for the ultimate end of nature. A sonorous, visual experience resonates through the virtual window of her installations, video-installations, mobile-paintings, and site-specific works, to evoke an echo that reverberates from the latent potency of nature. Recalling the artistic and literary allegory of Echo and Narcissus, as narrated by the poet Ovid in The Metamorphoses, Fernández’s exhibition suggests a new mode of configuring nature which resonates with synthesis, signs, and the rhythm of an endless repetition. As we trace the artistic and literal journeys of Echo into the contemporary era, this figure seems to find a new voice in Magdalena Fernández’s practice, speaking the last word of an artistic language whose style finds its premises in abstract painting and formalism. The echo of Fernández’s work returns an artistic experience through the mirroring of nature and the marking of a feminine sign: just as the figure of Echo speaks from the background of a natural setting, so Magdalena Fernández’s practice resounds from an immersive landscape to interrogate the entangled relation between humans and nature. In so doing, Fernández's work makes room and gives voice to the unrepresented aspects of nature, which resound with a language of sonorous, heterogeneous experiences, reminding us of an ethics of belonging.

The artist’s practice is characterized by a meticulous method of investigation that creates a bridge between nature, its inherent laws and the purity of ideal, abstract and rational forms. At the basis of her practice is an ethical approach that supersedes rationalism to reconnect the human with the natural world through an audio-visual resonance that does not claim to be a language, but the echo of an experience returning from sedimentations, repositions, geometries, and configurations. Magdalena Fernández's practice displaces the function of rational form within natural necessity and enables the disclosure of a different order of composition emerging from a radical experience. The reinvention of an artistic, ethical language calls for a collective experience to suggest modes of belonging and being true to nature. The inaugural diptych, 1pm SO11 (2011) and 1pmSO15 (2015), is an eloquent example of how Magdalena Fernández's poetics reflects the unity of a conscious experience through visual and sonorous elements. Never self-referential, the mirroring of Fernández’s work extends towards ‘the Other’ through an endless chain of structures, rhythms, and abstract signs.

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