Untitled

“My characteristic images and themes are objects from an unreal world of aggression and conflict,” Fernández once explained, “in which mechanical parts appear together with anatomical ones, under the surgeon’s scalpel, under the introspection of a curious mind, and in certain tormented zones.” The piercing, psychological intensity of his paintings conveys “a great deal of alienation,” he acknowledged, even a tortured “angoisse métaphysique” that materialized in the trauma and early self-reckonings of his exile from Cuba, which began in 1959.1 Fernández came into contact with late Surrealism while in Paris during the 1960s, and his palette shifted from the cool, melancholic color of his Cuban years toward intimate shades of beige. This progression is exquisitely rendered in Untitled (1960) (refer to lot 110), whose allusive, anatomical forms anticipate the monumental Développement d’un délire (1961), featured in Brian de Palma’s darkly erotic thriller, Dressed to Kill. In his subsequent black-and-white period, which continued through his time in Puerto Rico (1968-72), Fernández combined geometric forms with suggestive sadomasochisms, his work engaging with contemporary hard-edged abstraction and Postminimalism.
The black-and-white paintings defined the terms around which Fernández oriented his practice following his move to New York, where he spent the last three decades of his career. Their conjunction of (part-)bodies—erotic and psychosomatic, diasporic and national—anticipated the transgressive body politics of later series and brought him into the orbit of the emerging Downtown scene. “In New York, I found again the vitality of art,” Fernández recalled, and he began to site his practice within the punk-bohemian and queer counterculture of the East Village, a connection later deepened through his close friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, whom he met in 1979.[2] Working in series, he explored sexual taboos and constraints, probing visceral and metaphoric anatomies—of armor plates and anacondas, butterflies and femmes-oiseaux—with ardent, and unflinching, intensity. Encompassing “a metaphor of belts, pieces of armor or machinery, binding strings, cutting knives, and violent actions that plague the body and mind,” his painting, in his words, “represents an oneiric reality in which man is besieged by a number of forces that surround him: eroticism, mechanical civilization, the elements of war, as well as other conflicting impositions.”3
A horizontal array of darkly gleaming plates, the present Untitled belongs to his series of armaduras, begun in 1973 and varyingly reprised throughout his career. Articulated in slender bands, the armor is layered and tightly nested; it conceals a long, tumescent body that stretches the length of the canvas, gently swelling beneath the fissured surface. Many of the vertical straps are, characteristically, riveted and perforated; others extend above and below the main rectangular expanse, further emphasizing the three-dimensionality of the armor and its corporeal plasticity. “The representation in almost all of my paintings is in the foreground,” Fernández confirmed, “like sculptural reliefs or suspended objects in front of a vertical surface.”4 This erotic embodiedness is more literal in other works from this series, for example the anthropomorphic Warrior (1975; The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum) and Las Tres Gracias (1975; Art Museum of the Americas), drawn from Greek mythology; later paintings incorporated fleshy—phallic and polymastic—interiors. The latent body intimated in the present Untitled remains more enigmatic, however, its contours obsessively, even fetishistically sheathed beneath layers of physical and psychological armor.
“I am a painter of ambiguous abstractionism and certain anatomical themes,” Fernández declared. “While the erotic content of my images is clear,” he acknowledged, “I do not consider myself an erotic artist. I started out by transforming fruit and objects characteristic of still-life. I have endeavored to preserve the essential quality of these objects in the final shapes they have become.”5 His morphology of objects approached abstraction, seen equally in the fluid, liminal forms of Untitled (1960) and in the serial armaduras, sublimated and monochromatic. A tonal study in dark brown, the present Untitled betrays its latent anatomy through subtle chiaroscuro effects, its succession of straps carefully modeled around a protuberant, phallic body. Its edgy intimacy, conveyed through a psychosexual iconography of desire and restraint—explicitly, of leather and bondage—doubtless reflects the period sensibility of 1970s New York. Yet the armaduras also manifest the pain and vulnerability of the Cuban body, their mechanics of eroticism enacting a private, and deeply national, allegory of exile.
This painting comes from the collection of Ramón Osuna (1937-2019), Fernández’s cousin and longtime collector of his work. An early promoter of Cuban and Latin American art in Washington, D.C., Osuna worked with José Gómez Sicre at the Organization of American States in the 1960s and later directed the pioneering Pyramid Galleries, where he organized the exhibition, Agustín Fernández: Paintings (February-March 1978).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park