When Juan Carlos Fernandez travelled from South America to Roberts Creek for a course advertised in Fine Woodworking magazine, he didn’t expect to become ensnared by the creative community of the Sunshine Coast and relocate some 8,000 kilometers. In Venezuela, his vocation of journeyman carpentry was relatively sedate and secure. He signed up for the woodworking course without thinking about it.
It’s been 19 years since that spur-of-the-moment decision. Last week Fernandez opened an exhibition of his carving and painting at The Kube gallery in Gibsons — the first solo show in about eight years for the Coast-based artist. “I felt right at home when I got to the Creek,” he recalled. “It was a life changer.”
The title of his show is Plasma, not a word normally associated with solid and smooth-to-the-touch sculptures in red and yellow cedar. “Plasma is what the universe is made of,” Fernandez explained. “Supposedly 99.99% of the universe is all plasma. I always think of where ideas come from, and I think it’s maybe through the plasma that we’re getting those signals. The Greek root of the word signifies creation, so that’s why it works with me making art.”
The journey from everyday joinery to fine carving — like his teardrop-shaped Waterfall, or the bas-relief Mitosis rendered in jelutong softwood — is not as distant as one might think. Fernandez started carving on his own while making cabinets. “But the level of cabinetry you learn in a fine woodworking school, it’s a rite of passage, and it’s almost like art itself,” he said. “You make your own tools, and you spend so much time making a piece of furniture that it’s not like regular furniture.”
Even so, he has embraced the no-rules world of fine art, both in two and three dimensions. Fernandez’s carved works transcend traditional sculpture: the irregular and interlocking segments of his Aleatory Geometry combine to form compass roses set at oblique angles. (The word aleatory signifies randomness; Fernandez calls the piece a “map to getting lost.”) The wood extrudes toward the viewer, sparingly painted in maritime grey, imbuing it with the kaleidoscopic appearance of a turbulent fractal.
The geometries of his acrylic trompe-l’œil acrylic 8/8 Portal were all drawn freehand, meticulously angled to suggest a physical latticework existing in parallel dimensions.
“When I drew it I didn’t expect it to have an optical illusion,” Fernandez admitted. “I call those things gifts: they’re things that when you’re experimenting you run into. That’s one of them, and the painting kind of vibrates.”
The pieces on display at The Kube were fashioned over three years of painting and carving, usually on Saturdays when Fernandez travels by bus and ferry to work at a friend’s gallery in the city. “I call it my favourite day of the week because I go pursue my dream and feed my soul,” he said. “And living in Roberts Creek, you can be by yourself and at any time you can go into the forest. That’s where my inspiration comes, from nature.”
Generational and generative metaphors abound: Fernandez learned to draw the sand dollar-like motif in Flower of Life when he was a child. “My mother, even though she wasn’t much of an artist, showed me how to draw them,” he recalled. “Later in life I realized: oh, this has been drawn for ages, and it’s actually a representation of the origin of the universe.”
Juan Carlos Fernandez’s Plasma continues at The Kube gallery until Sept. 3.