Like a garden or a park, the colors of Fernanda Caballero (Mexico City, 1990) are an invitation to get lost in play and movement. Her painting process begins by challenging color to move across the canvas, just as she challenges her own body to imprint movement onto the brushstroke. From a magical intuition of color, Fernanda’s works communicate through the sensitive, the intuitive. They awaken in us the freshness of a color that smells and sounds free.

Although influenced by body-art movements and abstract expressionism, Caballero’s works are created from an anti-academic space. They merge with her unconscious in a moment of spatial wisdom, where colors begin to speak their own language, engaging in a sensitive exploration of the relationships between color, chance, the free will of materials, and her unconscious way of creating in the world.

As stated in her biography, “Fernanda’s work is more related to understanding the emotion behind color, shape, and the ephemeral than to imitating the reality we understand as ‘ours.’” That is why her works emerge from a personal place, where the randomness of the encounter between color and movement traps her in a choreography within the canvas. It is no coincidence that she is also drawn to dance, corporeality, and meditation. Her brushstrokes unfold in different moments, where pigments are added to the canvas from various positions and gestures. Indigo blue does not carry the same movement as green. Yellow speaks a different language than pink. From a deeply intimate place for the artist, this exhibition moves us from her safe space, from a moment of complete surrender without selfishness, as if inviting us into her secret garden.

At the end of the room, there is a triptych very different from the rest. Three large drops observe the other shapes with much more calm and contemplation. These three paintings follow a different process in the studio; they are color portals that translate into her own body as a clock of eternity or a mandala of contemplation. Each layer of color must dry before applying the next, but the weight of the liquid paint turns these canvases into pools of energy that age over time, while the rest of the more energetic and fast-paced works are created with vertiginous speed. As Fernanda mentions, “these pieces observe, contain, and age the frantic process of the others.”

Finally, in the text the artist writes for the exhibition, she gives us that space of complete vulnerability that is conveyed through the honesty of color, allowing us to imagine her barefoot in her studio, with a carpeted floor and curved tin ceilings, as if a space hangar held the secrets of an alchemical laboratory where new pigments are being invented while dancing barefoot on the canvases.

For Fernanda, this exhibition is a home, and for us, it is a space of inspiration and reverie that reveals our deepest longings.

Josseline Pinto