Selva naranja

Claudia Fernández
Selva naranja, 2020
Lithograph on 300gr cotton paper
Image: 40 x 30 cm; Sheet: 55 x 64 cm
Edition of 20, +8 AP
Signed, dated and numbered in pencil
Accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity signed by the artist

In the days of confinement that we are living in due to the pandemic, I've once again had time to draw and paint, which has given me great pleasure. Of all the visual arts, I really like taking photos, making installations and painting, but the latter is the one that brings me the most peace.
I like that when I paint, time changes and the reality outside the work becomes relative. Many ideas happen while making a painting and the image becomes a spiritual and mathematical challenge; geometric and political; happy or sad; crazy or conscious; but a challenge which results in the painting being able to do whatever it will, and one can say whatever one wants in it.

This series got it's start from a small Romanticist painting that I own and adore. The image is painted in oil and represents a place in the tropics, where a river meets an estuary and a cow appears eating tall grass under palm trees.
I really like this piece because of how it is painted and because it reminds me of a place near Acapulco where I attended a soccer game some years ago - a strange event in that it seemed to me like a small paradise, that I could not forget.
Lately I have had a relationship with other tropics, all these ecosystems that, like others, are home to millions of species. Almost like a horror vacui, the jungles reproduce green in leaves of all sizes and formats, palms and prehistoric ferns, bamboos, grasses.
The rhythmic leaves of the palms sway sensually - all this foliage is home to species of insects, birds and mammals, a thousand species of plants and millions of shades of green. A jungle is like a vital explosion. Today, also an absurd melancholy because like all nature, like all ecosystems, it is endangered by the arrival of man.

These landscapes represent a repeated respect for the now mythical 'call of the jungle.'

-Claudia Fernández, 2020