Brenda R Fernandez

Z SÁNCHEZ Comisario In 1974, the French psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu coined the concept of the "Skin-ego" ("Le Moi-peau"). In this concept, Anzieu synthesized the results of research that led him to conclude that the ego and the skin functioned similarly as surfaces that limit, contain, and organize. The point of bringing up this idea is explained by the stunning work of the artist Brenda R. Fernández, which is marked by the equation of matter = skin = psyche. This conceptual matrix is enriched through its overlap with two other discursive lines tasked with conveying its production: the tireless exploration of the margin of possibilities open to gestural abstraction; and the growing need to question the bi-dimensionality of modernist painting in order to advance first toward tridimensionality and finally toward sculpturality. Indeed, Fernández's work represents one of the most interesting expressions of the transmodern category called "painting in the expanded field.

In structuring this journey painting takes from flatness toward its expansion of the sculptural, three stages can be established: the wound; bi-frontality; and the body. Beginning with the slash that "wounds" the canvas, we must say that skin only speaks and becomes language when it is open or when its quiet continuity is interrupted. Brenda R. Fernández is not content to slash the pictorial surface— in the pristine style of Lucio Fontana —and shows no qualms in flaying a canvas and showing its stretcher in works that have nothing to envy in the work of Ángela de la Cruz. Skin that breaks is no longer a flat, bidimensional film that contains the body's physical and psychic insides. On the contrary, open skin ceases to be a plain and becomes an agitated and unpredictable orography that conquers tri-dimensionality. When skin opens, the body— volume, object —manifests itself in the same way that paint enters space. In the case of Brenda R. Fernández, this conquest of space takes on a double direction, forward and backward. In some of her work, the Mexican artist plays with a piece's bifrontality through the use of a single element which crosses the painting and shows itself on both its faces.

The body (which is to say the sculptural) is already an imminent presence and as such ends up manifesting itself in its "cubes," and later life-sized in pieces in which Fernández uses molds of her own body made with acrylic bandages.

From the skin to the body— or equally: from painting to sculpture — through an incision, a wound which unleashes the transgression of limits.

Pedro A. Cruz Sánchez Emisario. Murcia University