Salvaged Stories: Adrián Fernández

Thomas Nickles Project is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Cuban artist Adrián Fernández. Salvaged Stories marks Fernández's second solo show at Thomas Nickles Project and his first exhibition dedicated solely to sculpture.

 

Over the course of his career, Fernández has explored the social impact of Cuba's political experiment through a dialogue of mediums. As one of the key exponents of young Cuban photography, he has often been associated with the documentation of Cuban life, yet he remains committed to exploring the possibilities of sculpture and installation. Through his photographic approach to Cuban reality, Fernández has deconstructed various systems of representation along with the historical contexts, ideologies, and cultural paradigms behind them to create a new image. In this creative exercise, sculpture has become the medium for shaping visions of possible futures for a country with a political system in decline. Fernández’s artistic imagination draws from the current state of the Cuban context—the destruction of what was never completed—while envisioning possibilities for transformation. His sculptures—scaffoldings and casting molds of invisible structures that remain abstract, unfinished, and in progress—have found their ideal landscape in photography. In Salvaged Stories, photography becomes the absent frame from which Fernández's new sculptures emerge in fragments.

 

The body of work that Fernández will debut in his presentation at Thomas Nickles Project this November centers on a new series of steel and bronze pieces, continuing his conceptual exploration of Cuban futurability and expanding his experimentation with materials. These sculptures are all unique—impossible to reproduce—, each manufactured by the artist in the seclusion of his New Jersey studio. In the manual creation process, Fernández has embraced the potential for accidents. There are no preliminary sketches or mockups, only a basic outline that serves as a starting point. It can be argued that he sculpted them in real time, with their final shape emerging from the decisions he made through his interaction with the materials, as if the final form was discovered rather than planned.

 

In a very astute way, Salvaged Stories is a continuation of Fernández's first presentation at Thomas Nickles Project, Sketch for a Monument. The new body of work resembles archaeological objects, fragments of the invisible structures depicted by Fernández in his previous photographic series included in that 2022 show. The combination of materials in the new sculptures—the roughness of the steel exterior and the brightness of the textured bronze interior—seems to testify to the passage of time and carry remnants of the content once held by the former whole. They are, simultaneously, relics and futuristic artifacts.

 

Fernández's displacement from Havana to New York four years ago, as part of the largest wave of Cuban emigration to the United States since 1959, makes these pieces his first body of work with psychological implications. The artist's diasporic life is still to be framed, much like his new sculptures exist without the fictional landscape of his photographs. As the title of the presentation states, this is also a collection of Salvaged Stories, a way for him to reconstruct himself from the pieces of the project he was born into that are worth saving, and to belong to the new reality he is in the process of building.