5. Exploring Movement

In her exploration of the echoes and reverberations thanks to which "nature" and "geometry" reflect each other, Magdalena Fernández focuses her reflections on the dynamic dimension of both realms. Whether they be physical structures or videos, installations or drawings, her works delve into the mystery that reigns over the dynamics of bodies—of the world, of physis—the force or power, the capacity to act that makes the transition from potential to kinesis possible, as it does the concreteness of movement and the appearance of transformations. She works, then, with dynamis and energeia, with a body's power to reshape its own determinations, with a form's potential to become something else, to be modified. Both power (dynamis) and potential (energeia) appear in these works as forces inherent in structures themselves, as what enables them "to be" in a constant flux of mutation and renewal, thus revealing the fluid, changing substrate that articulates reality and turns it into living, vital existence, into activity and event.

It is thus that her mobile structures, her objects and ductile images are altered, vary, and flow, manifesting what they properly are, unfurling and displaying themselves. Lines operate as forces and tensions that are articulated in an unpredictable and ever changing system of relations, thereby making present a fabric—a framework—reflecting the complex connectivity that governs and drives the passage from potential to act, from the possibility of being other to the concreteness of taking place as change, growth, becoming and development. As a result, in her videographic notes, engravings, and space-appropriating installations, Magdalena Fernández composes a single, integral presence that unfurls the opposing pairs of potential and act, matter and form, taking them on as parallel, mutually dependent structures.

SP

Magdalena Fernández offers an insight into the very essence of nature through an artistic investigation on movement as it emerges from the substrate of an experience and surfs onto the pictorial fields of her works. The echo of Magdalena’s works reverberates with the dynamis of life, its virtual expressivity, rhythmic undulations, and figures drawn from geometrical abstraction. The immersive field of her installations resonates with a flow that is marked by synthesis, intervals, points and lines as they dissolve into an endless repetition, as it is suggested by the loop of her video-installations. Aligned with the attempt to supersede the order of Euclidean geometry through the register of abstract, modernist, and kinetic arts, Magdalena Fernández explores a materialism of deep time that translates into a chain of repetitions and re-enactments. Motion, dynamis, fluxes, and rhythms pervade the immersive experience of her installations, recalling the floating surfaces of Malevich’s paintings to suggest a surface's effects emerging from the substrate of her investigation. The fluid aspects of her works evolve and extend the possibilities of composition through chance, unpredictability, and approximation. The immersive field of 2Imp009 (2009) intertwines the assonances of syncopated raindrops and the sonorous effects of corporeal percussions, revisiting the plastic unity suggested by Mondrian. Through this composition, Fernández configures the chiasmus between drops of water falling vertically and the reverberations of horizontal lines extending towards infinity.

The virtual aspects of Fernández’s installations supersede the mechanics of solid bodies to focus on the integral, constituent, qualitative aspects of matter characterized by vibrations, fluxes, and pure flows. The use of new media, animations and digital technologies allows the artist to articulate an affective movement to address an experience of recreations and re-enactments for the viewer to experience. Fernández’s inquiry into movement attributes new meaning to traditional compositional elements. In particular, the syntax of abstraction and geometrical patterns is enriched by an enquiry that supersedes the logic of the conscious mind to reclaim the synthesis of time, nature, and human experience. In her work, synthesis is a process of reduction that is expressed not with a trajectory, but rather the multiple, heterogeneous orientation of points, lines, and surfaces. In this sense, Magdalena Fernández extends the notion of composition to explore shapes, geometries and figures through the flux of time, which subjects them to continuous metamorphoses and transformations. Without a specific trajectory, addressing only orientations, the surface of Fernández’s work reverberates with a rhythm of life, belonging, and the contrast between presence and absence, depth and surface, as evinced by the rigorous choice of black and white of her installations.

SB