Painting that consciously takes place in an era after the avant-garde and the “isms” that obsessed artists for so long, the work of Fermín Gutiérrez can be interpreted as an exercise in exploring the realities of dream and imagination. There is no localism, no history, no message of salvation or condemnation in the sometimes underground and sometimes kaleidoscopic paintings of this artist, because in them everything happens in spaces and times that are not those of this world.
Academically trained in architecture and design, Fermín manages to combine various virtues in his painting that place him as one of the most brilliant painters of his generation.
Originally from Chihuahua, Fermín Gutiérrez has consolidated his own style that is characterized by oneirism, the combination of zigzagging and daring colors, and a visual of the northern Mexican desert. Fermín has traveled through various thematic latitudes, based on a figurativeism that sometimes recalls to the painters of the Oaxacan school, but which shows a solid training that includes sources such as Mexican popular tradition and Islamic art. The emotional modes of his painting, sometimes contradictory, revolve around the search for our often indecipherable secret worlds.
What is the pictorial language with which Fermín Gutiérrez speaks to us?
My language has traveled from the dark to the luminous, from the simple to the complex and the baroque, from the smooth to the twisted, to the obsession with the object, to the obsession with filling space. It is, in any case, a language in transit, in movement, in continuous evolution. I have tried to direct that movement, to give it a certain direction, but I notice that the space of the blank canvas wins over me and is, ultimately, the one that decides for itself. I wanted to be simple, but I am a baroque painter, a painter with a nostalgia for sensuality, for exoticism. But regardless of the language he adopts, my themes are of great narrative simplicity. I consider this important because my objects, since they occur in a non-narrative space, are the ones that become complicated, there is a great distance from object to object in my paintings. Each painting takes you to an internal struggle, a search. I don't really like narrativity in painting, it's something that even bothers me. I like that the elements are located and defend themselves in the pictorial space. The viewer must have freedom, he must be able to enjoy for himself each element that he discovers in a painting. To narrate something in a painting is to hang little miracles on the viewer. Contrary to what it may seem, a narrative painting can be extraordinarily tedious, and it is a painting that generally tends to be abandoned. The painting should not be easily decipherable. It must be a secret game, without superficial obviousness. In fact, painting, at least at a certain level of intensity, is nothing less than the abolition of the real. There is, of course, a painting that is merely social, I think of Mexican muralism, for example, in which narrativity is not only necessary but even defining. But I am talking about the easel, about intimate painting, which is intended for an individual, for a particular soul, for an accomplice. Art must walk in anxiety, in experiment, in search, in risk, even in the fall. A painting, like a poem, gains a lot from ambiguity.
