Exhibitions
Sylvia Fernández transforms painting into a territory of memory, body and nature with 'Belonging'
Crisis Gallery presents Belonging , the latest solo exhibition by Peruvian artist Sylvia Fernández, a show that opens on Wednesday, July 8, and brings together a new set of pictorial works in which the artist deepens a visual and emotional investigation that she has been developing in recent years.
More than a series of paintings, Belonging is conceived as an open inquiry into that which binds us together and constitutes us. Or, as its own internal resonance suggests, perhaps also as a “Being”: a question about what it means to inhabit a body, a memory, a landscape, or a light. To what do we belong? To whom? From where is that sense of belonging—or displacement—that permeates human experience constructed?
In this new phase of his work, Fernández proposes a style of painting that arises less from planning than from intuition. The images appear as if emerging from a heightened sense of awareness: something that doesn't necessarily have a defined form, but rather a presence, an emotion, an inner truth. His painting thus becomes a space of revelation, where sensation precedes discourse and matter becomes language.
Sylvia Fernández, When Night Falls, 2026.
The relationship between the body and nature—a recurring theme in previous series such as Conversations with Carmen and Let's Go Back —takes on a more explicit and intimate dimension here. In Belonging , nature functions not only as a backdrop or visual reference, but as a symbolic bridge, a poetics of the organic, and a trigger for memory. Through painterly gestures, layers of color, and a constantly evolving palette, the artist evokes expanding microorganisms, internal cartographies, and the passage from daylight to night. Time, color, and brushstroke operate as coordinates on an affective compass.
The exhibition explores belonging as a multifaceted, ever-changing, and constantly evolving experience. The female body emerges as a territory of discovery: a space that extends from the cellular level to the extremities that retain traces of memory. The experience of inhabiting a foreign land also arises, understood not only as uprooting but as a fertile form of non-belonging, capable of opening new possibilities for perception and creation. Added to this is the mind, conceived as a place where the imagination can unfold without restriction, and painting itself, affirmed as the space where the invisible finds form.
At the intersection of the intimate and the symbolic, the realistic, the abstract, and the surreal coexist without needing to be resolved. In Belonging , these dimensions are not presented in a linear or hierarchical manner: they coexist, influence each other, and engage in dialogue. The result is an exhibition that does not seek to offer definitive answers, but rather to open a field of sensitivity from which to consider belonging as a living, dynamic, and profoundly human process.
Sylvia Fernández, Belonging, 2026.
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