Teresita Fernandez at Galerie Almine Rech

19 rue Saintonge, Paris, France
through December 18th


by Robert J. Hughes

How light plays upon the world, upon the landscape, how the weather plays upon our vision are all preoccupations for the painter. As Monet said to Sacha Guitry when the great painter was very old and the great playwright very young, "Without sun, there is no Monet."

Sculptors, too, consider the fall of light and shadow on forms in space. Teresita Fernàndez, an American artist known for her almost environmental sculptures, which use light and shapes – enclosed circles, open stairs – to promote a sense of looking at the world from different angles and perspectives, offers the environment of the darkened seaside in a series of new works.

In her first exhibition at Almine Rech Gallery in Paris, Fernàndez combines the three-dimensional sculptural with the flat plane of the pictorial. Most of the works here are beautiful, shadowy depictions of water after dark. It is difficult to depict the shimmering evanescence of water at any time of day, but Fernàndez gives the viewer a view of the expansive horizon under a starlight sky, the stipples of rippling moonbeams creating a ghostly reverie of nighttime waters.

"Nocturnal (Horizon Line)," graphite on panel, shows the sweep of black sea stretching outward, invitingly. Moving closer in, a viewer can see the sculptural ridges of the graphite, the "pour" of the waves and reflected light. The graphite provides a real sense of water, even in the very near distance, and you can stand before even a small panel and get a sense of the wide eternal sea, with all of its unruly cinematic power.

Other works use small cut cubes of mirrored glass, arranged in sprays, to give a sense of energy in the very air – looking as an act of exultation. Fernàndez also uses polished precision-cut steel to similar effect, crafting representations of nature with machined metals, as in "Mirror – Terllis," which looks like an arbor frozen mid-growth, but still, because of its reflective surfaces, alive to the gleaming day.

What Fernàndez has done here is something new: she's created sculptural landscapes that broaden the canvas, the plane of the wall, into three-dimensional space. Others have done this before, of course, such as Frank Stella. But Fernàndez has created still-life sculptures of vegetation of cold steel and glass that are at once sculpture and painting; you don't feel fooled – these aren't the very representations of nature of a trompe l'oeil, but reflections of reality, a mirror of what our mind might remember about a moonlight ocean, a trellis of leaves, a spray of dappled leaves, a memory etched in graphite, steel or glass of what we believed we saw.