Jake Fernandez and his Reconstructed Collages of Nature

Artist Jake Fernandez left Cuba in 1961 and came to live in the United States. He and his family settled in Florida and he later attended the University of South Florida. Living in the tropical state Fernandez came to study and appreciate the beauty of Nature. He often took photographs of the parks and green spaces. That practice continued through his career as he documented his travels throughout the United States - New York, California, Florida and Indiana and Illinois. He amassed thousands of photographs and one day started to cut them up to make collages of those images.

The multiple views look he created from these photographs was very like the method of multiple perspectives created by David Hockney's photo collages. However, Fernandez took his collages a step further....the result after thirty years of making collages, is a wonderful exhibition of small works currently showing at the Komechak Art Gallery at Benedictine University. It is called "Second Nature".

Fernandez doesn't just cut up his photographs, he makes uniquely organic cut shapes and splinters the fragmented images into a million tiny, microscopic pieces. The scale of the images is square or rectangular. They are surely larger than the original photographs, but his incinerated cut shapes fracture into countless tiny pieces that when he glues them back together, they become a mosaic, a jeweled surface that stuns the viewer into a mesmerizing silence. The viewer is engaged to come close to see how Fernandez takes apart and then reconstructs a place of natural beauty.

The infinite layering that ultimately becomes a newly re-defined place in Nature, makes us contemplate Fernandez' technique, but moreso makes us see his natural places of wonder in a whole new way. They are definitely abstracted from the original source of reference, but they take on a cosmic type of existentialism. His works refer to the wonder of seeing a Jackson Pollock drip painting, or the elegant simplicity of a Rothko, but Fernandez' works are so densely built up in tecture and surface that we are pulled in to look at the collages literally examining singly cut pieces. The result is a type of Zen experience, where the viewer has reached a heightened awareness of beauty and destruction and resurrection.

One cannot help but take away an impression of obsessive searching, relentless pursuit for the 'Truth'. These are incredible works by an artist clearly at the top of his game.

Fernandez also makes paintings and drawings - large scale - of the same subjects. His mastery of the pencil and the brush is evident in his brushwork and his search for shape, light and depth of mysterious spaces. His work truly reflects his love of subject, and he is a man on a mission to make a new chapter into the art history books about landscape painting, drawing and collage.

The exhibition runs from March 6 to April 15, 2017. For more information about the artist and his work go to http://www.jakefernandez.com