Fernan’s practice sits at the intersection of the nostalgic and the humorous, simultaneously wistful and enigmatically familiar. Fernan offers us fractional details from a life made universal in its anonymity. Ordinary objects and people seem at a pause, as if waiting for a scene to begin or, perhaps, settling into a new solitude, an event now finished having moved beyond the painted frame. The suggestion of that energetic edge—that cusp of an instant, a moment suspended—threads the past and present together in a single image, caught in perfectly fraught balance.

I understand my work as a collection of autobiographical and psychosomatic images that emerge from the interweaving of personal memories, art history, and Latin-American literature.

Working across paintings, drawing, and writing, I see the act of making as a way to both dilute and saturate a memory; to fade and sharpen an image; to appropriate and care for a sentence. My depictions of common objects and elusive faces, to me, act as companions that evoke the melancholic and sometimes humorous act of waiting: for a glass of water to be poured, for a message to be answered, or for a coin to finish turning. —Fernan