Fernando Gaspar Portuguese, b. 1966
"More than a mere discovered place, it is a work in progress. That is why my work drifts, returns, does not repeat or mince."
- Fernando Gaspar
Fernando Gaspar has been exhibiting continuously since 1986, collaborating with Portuguese and foreign art galleries. So far, there are more than sixty solo exhibitions, some National Awards and representations in public and private collections.
A self-taught artist exploring themes of identity and belonging, Gaspar tells stories and recounts journeys through his work. Gaspar’s painting, sculpture, and poetry are rooted in a fascination with the concept of territorial identity. His paintings examine the relationship between brushstrokes rather than color relationships. Just as identity is determined by language and a sense of belonging, Gaspar attempts to reveal identifying marks and underscore similarities.
"Of my work it matters the color, the trace, or no more than what is heard of them. It matters what they both say, when together or apart, present or announced, or no more than what looses them. It is important to speak of this life that stretches between two worlds, both new; of the former where we can no longer fit, the new where we stubbornly adapt. It is important to speak of this time, of this catalytic place where everything begins, again. It is important to be, to connect with the hands and the head, the certainty cured to the freshness of the becoming. And from this struggle is done the work. Figuration prevails, or abstraction reigns in defiance of the covenant. It makes clear the origin and in the next moment already wanders almost erratically dismantling the maternal mark in search of wider ways. "
Gaspar continues, "For we too are all this, both memory and invention, silence and noise, peace and discord. As a people and as an artist, I feel like this: in between, between. And my painting or what remains of it, thing or nothing, is no more than the visible essay of this being, of this being so. School orphan, wild and stubborn, is born and thriving on the sweet surfaces of the paper, in the tensions of a woven linen, worked stand, palimpsest care as if smoothing the place for a ceremony. One by one, single as the first, as accomplices as a child, are always the sum of what precedes them, ways to open to the next, pieces that do not altogether separate by any universal law. It is an exercise of mine, an intimate thing that makes me understand, in order to understand myself in this kind of delusion, so deliciously."