Objects in mirror are closer than they appear, but what happens when you are both the subject observing and the object being observed? This is the position Inés Fernández-Shaw finds herself in, a young artist whose work channels her complex reflections on self-observation. In the age of the selfie and of relentless image consumption, identity becomes performative, oscillating between subject and object. Inés Fernández-Shaw brings this contemporary question to the canvas in order to examine it. A chameleonic identity leads her to be many and none at once; she comes to know herself through the Other and through their gaze. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote, "What I fear or desire is always an avatar of my own existence, but nothing happens to me except through what is not me"i.
The artist's distinctive style emerges from a split upbringing between Brussels and Madrid, filled with local and universal references. Against the backdrop of Spanish painting, she combines Goya's influence and his suggested landscapes with that of the great Flemish masters, particularly in their taste for framing figures within architectural elements, a device we have often seen in the work of contemporary artist Christian Rex van Minnen. The bodies, however, draw on Bouguereau: pink, rounded and multiplied flesh, as in The Oreads. An amalgam of references, all with Europe as their common mother, but her women, her women are those from all around the world. From the Venus of Willendorf to Georgina Rodríguez, we have witnessed the female body be observed, reproduced, and commented upon for centuries, a central figure in visual culture. Rubens or Titian, Ingres or Cabanel are only a few of the many men who, throughout history, have represented women as they wanted to see them, as they wanted them to be, giving form to those goddesses and odalisques. Thus, the body is female, but the gaze has been male, a concept which has become embedded even in self observation, as Margaret Atwood eloquently put it: "You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur"ii. Like Ingres in The Turkish Bath, Inés observes these tense and relaxed bodies, resting and interacting, with the difference that she needs no peephole through which to observe herself. Taking a kinder, perhaps gentler approach than what we might encounter in Jenny Saville, carnality within the figurative defines her pictorial language, using these bodies as a vehicle for raising the universal question of identity. She reappropriates the female body and its image, reclaiming its status as an object through her own gaze, distancing the nude from sexuality and presenting it instead as a vital force. As Courbet pointed out, the female body is The Origin of the World.
The complex consideration of the self and identity, subject and body, together with these painterly references, is embodied by the figures which inhabit this exhibition. Inés Fernández-Shaw's attentive gaze materializes in the omnipresent celestial body which bears her own face: it is she who observes her bodies as they expand and twist to adapt to the scene, to fit within the canvas, similar to the way identity is molded under the gaze, whether our own or someone else's. The scene appears almost like a stage set, a familiar kind of nature within a landscape that seems familiar yet cannot quite be identified, a landscape made up of all the places we inhabit. The bird acts as an intrusive observer, the gaze of the Other slipping in from the fictional horizon, playing among the bodies and casting doubt on the truthfulness of the scene. Mediated observation produces this distortion of reality, magnifying objects and distancing them from their appearance, while paradoxically making them feel even closer, almost within. Unlike other artists, Inés Fernández-Shaw invites us not to lose ourselves in the work, but to be present in our role as spectators: observing the scene and its figures just as she observes herself. In an effort to see beyond the surface, Inés now gazes into the mirror to examine her reflection and distinguish the elements that constitute it, considering which elements she recognizes and which she can claim as her own. Perhaps like the woman Toulouse-Lautrec painted before a mirror, or like Velázquez's Venus; perhaps like so many of us, when a drunken trip to the bathroom ends with a stranger staring back at us over the sink.
Inés Alonso Jarabo
i de Beauvoir, S. (1949), The Second Sex (8th edition, 2012), Random House, United States, p. 194.
ii Atwood, M. (1993), The Robber Bride (Virago edition, 1996), Virago, United Kingdom, p. 501.
