The Ghost Gaze

The Ghost Gaze (La mirada fantasma) is based on a tension between reality and fiction. They are portraits of artists whose models are not the real ones, but people who resemble them. Fernando develops his work mainly around painting and his own history. He starts from a reality today, which is to a large extent a cultural heritage. And he offers us a personal reading in which silence, gaps in information and the dark areas of memory take centre stage. The starting point for this series is apocryphal material. From there, he creates new images and presents them as if they belonged to his own genealogy of art. A deepfake that begins with research into the material that constitutes the visual and cultural heritage of each creator - self-portraits, prints, photographs, etc. - and then transforms them by using other models that resemble them. To do so, he draws on his visual memory and the casuistry that creates links between different people - an actress on Google or a friend on Facebook - establishing hybrid images in which perception, search and memory intervene. Pure subtlety and synthesis.

 The result is a strange new family tree in which we can find Francisco de Goya in the attitude of starting a drawing; the hapless Paula Modersohn Becker dancing happily in the dark; the young Ribera looking haughtily at us: and Velázquez, Rembrandt, Giovanni Bellini, Louise Bourgeois, Vilhelm Hammershøi, Käthe Kollvitz, Hans Holbein the Younger, Corot, Picasso, Gwen John or Marlene Dumas, among other illustrious personalities, in an imaginative exercise that is situated between art history, divertimento, imitation and imposture.