The Brooklyn Rail

Teresita Fernández creates an archaeological survey of the mind, the land, the sea, and the sky, an integrated, interrelated, living universe. “You look at the landscape,” she explained in an ICA Boston video interview, “but the landscape also looks back at you; landscape is more about what you don’t see than what you do see.” To explore this intimate and complex relationship, Fernández makes portraits of the landscape itself: Where is it? What is it? Who is it? How do we sense it? and Where do we fit into it? 

Titled Soil Horizon, her show leads us through a landscape of time, history, art history, memory, emotion, and thought. She invites us to immerse ourselves in her work, a simulacrum of her universe. Hanging in the front room are four large relief paintings from the “Soil Horizon” series, composed of solid charcoal, wood, volcanic rock, and mixed media on aluminum panel. Three are vertically oriented and remind us of traditional Chinese landscape paintings, which situate us in nature and guide us up through mountains and along nonspecific circuitous pathways that nevertheless constitute paths to illumination.

Fernández turns two dimensions into three, telling a complicated story, using the literal materials of the earth to translate two-dimensional painting into sculpture. In the reliefs, layers of charcoal are compressed to suggest horizons. She has sourced black volcanic sand and red iron-rich sand from two different continents to link geography and geology, to unify her world. Hierarchical visions show dense rock formations at their base, rising mountains and pathways followed and surrounded by empty cloudlike atmosphere, which is sandwiched rising up through space and serving to cushion stacked-earth strata. In effect, Fernándeztranslates these ethereal portrayals into an architecture, which conceptually houses our consciousness and, at the same time, expresses a poetic story of dreaming and escape. She puts the earth to work as material in what is both figurative and literal space. 

There is so much going on here. The essential link connecting the parts is the spiritual, which addresses the body in space and time. Two large sculptures accompany the reliefs along with Fernández’s first film. In the central gallery a large, 24-foot-long cast-concrete sculpture Sunrise (Sunset) presides. It is topped by shimmering multicolored rocks and minerals, arrayed so as to refer to the life cycle. Its humped shape ominously suggests a burial mound while in the same room, the installation Sky Burial, covers the longest wall. It consists of 7,500 reflective ceramic cubes that shimmer in such a way as to conjure the Tibetan notion of putting a deceased body on top of a mountain where it can be consumed by birds and then become widely dispersed, adding up to a connected ephemeral landscape that links body and earth. Bisecting the piece are empty bands of space—a bardo—separating earth and space, life and death.

Soil Horizon also features Caribbean Cosmos (Earth), a confounding piece composed of thousands of tiny ceramic tesserae. These allude to materials of the earth and at the same time, to the movement of celestial bodies, and even to the functions of the human body, a microcosm.

Finally, there is a film, Fernández’s first, on which she collaborated with Juan Carlos Alom. Titled Cuajaní, it stars the landscape of Cuba, the artist’s homeland. Here the land is portrayed as protagonist and is seductively shaped with hills that seem to echo the human body.  

In an essay accompanying a show on Chinese landscape painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art bulletin we learn how, in the Yuan dynasty, “there was the burgeoning of a second kind of cultivated landscape, the ‘mind landscape,’…. Painting was no longer about the description of the visible world; it became a means of conveying the inner landscape of the artist’s heart and mind.” Fernández herself achieves a metamorphosis of painting by metamorphosing herself.