Cuban-American artist Teresita Fernández has made her identify with large-scale, site-specific installations and sculptures that look at notion, panorama and the psychological dimensions of area. On the heart of her apply is an aesthetic, philosophical and energetic investigation of supplies, exploring connections between geology and cosmology, the micro- and macrocosmos, to raised perceive the implications of human expertise inside an expanded area that always exceeds bodily and mental attain.
By means of a poetic and incisive inquiry into the stress between common forces and human capability, Fernández’s evocative works confront the facility and colonial exploitation embedded in landscapes and in supplies themselves. Her artwork reveals the complexities and contradictions of pure environments, presenting them not merely as bodily terrain however as charged areas of psychological, political and cultural resonance.
For her newest exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Seoul, Fernández turns to the notion of the horizon—that threshold between earthly and celestial realms, between parts, between sensorial and religious dimensions. Titled “Liquid Horizon,” the present options luminous sculptural panels marked by horizontal compositions that resemble maritime landscapes, with the ocean’s abysses set towards the profound darkness of an oceanic evening. “We’ve been conditioned to think about the time period horizon as one singular threshold between what’s above and what’s beneath,” Fernández tells Observer.
Her earlier physique of labor, Soil Horizon, drew on the geological time period describing the horizontal layers of rock and minerals that mark the earth’s formation. As she notes, the collection mirrored how the “horizon” shouldn’t be one line however strata that maintain previous, current and future. “Liquid Horizon” expands this conceptual framework from soil to ocean, partaking the fluid our bodies of
There’s something deeply primordial in regards to the pictures these works conjure, evoking the universe in its earliest genesis or streams of particles and molecules in steady transmutation throughout bodily states. Right here, the waterline turns into each threshold and abyss, holding the vastness above and beneath its liminal edge. Extending Fernández’s ongoing curiosity in subterranean landscapes, her inquiry strikes into the stratified depths of the ocean, revealing layers of shifting density and transparency as metaphors and manifestations of our unconscious—primordial connections to broader pure phenomena.
A core ingredient of Fernández’s apply is what she calls “the intelligence of supplies”—the assumption that matter carries political, philosophical and cultural which means as a part of its personal journey of formation and transformation. “Whereas a few of these works, particularly the panels, contact upon notions of portray, I completely consider them as sculptures, provided that the pictures are rising by a really tactile layering of charcoal, graphite, sand, ceramics and pigment that’s each dimensional and vibrating,” Fernández explains. “On this sense, supplies are already loaded with an intelligence that connects them to their sources and origins.”
For her, these works stay, in essence, fragments of the landscapes from which they arrive. The fabric decisions carry symbolic and conceptual weight, imbued with their very own histories. “I consider it as making a panorama with a panorama, in order that it’s by no means a logo of a panorama, however really a cloth reality,” she provides, noting how in some works, she intentionally invokes the violent and extractive histories of these two substances.
On the similar time, the works discover the interaction between geology and waterways, staging tensions between micro and macro to impress reflection on human influence and the bounds of notion. “I’m at all times all for these correlations between what’s immense and what’s intimate. The works operate on many scales concurrently that shift experientially as viewers transfer nearer to their surfaces,” Fernández confirms. “Most significantly, these states are vibrating, not mounted—however mutable, behaving like
On this context, scale additionally turns into vital. Whereas Fernández typically creates monumental environmental interventions—most lately her site-specific set up on the Menil Assortment—right here the works really feel extra contained and intimate. But they maintain the site-specific high quality central to her method, regularly negotiating the connection between supplies, area and viewer. “In some ways, I’m partaking viewers materially, virtually in order that one turns into the dimensions of the factor one is ,” she explains.
That is very true of White Phosphorus/Cobalt (2025), a glazed ceramic set up wherein a dispersed mosaic constellation materializes the concept that the macro comprises the infinity of the micro. Within the steady move of particles, the work embodies the cycles of start, transformation and destruction that entropy drives. “The association of hundreds of ceramic cubes seen from a distance features like a vibrating area of shade,” Fernández explains. “But, upon shut inspection, every particular person glazed ceramic dice seen up shut dissolves into an immense cosmic picture that implies galaxies—the huge nesting contained in the tiny.”
Fernández’s intention is for these works to stay materially dynamic, continually unfolding and collapsing into themselves, embodying the entropic construction of the cosmos. The exhibition options 9 strong graphite reduction panels titled Nocturnal (Milk Sky), evoking the rhythmic rise and fall of tides via layers of deep blue tones. Polished graphite parts play towards ethereal blue and white skies, making a dialogue of reflection and ambiance. Right here, as elsewhere within the present, using deep blue heightens the sense of huge, unreachable dimensions—phenomena solely partially graspable when set towards their broader cosmic scale. In the end, Fernández’s newest physique of sculptural fields serves as a meditation on humanity’s fragile place inside the universe, suspended amongst terrestrial, aquatic and celestial horizons on which we rely and with which we evolve in infinite reciprocity as a part of the planet’s matter.
Teresita Fernández’s “Liquid Horizon” is on view at Lehmann Maupin Seoul via October 25, 2025.
