12/01/08 - 10/02/08
FERNANDO VELAZQUEZ

¿Por qué el alma tiembla de tal manera?
Oigo el zumbido de mi sangre,
dentro de mi cráneo pasa una suave tormenta.

Why does my soul tremble so?

I hear the humming of my blood,
and a soft storm passes through my brain.

Rubén Darío, NOCTURNO

When you know you have teetered to the edge, change a single breath inside, you would slide crumbling to rocks insane below, such is the experience of entering a room with a Fernando Velazquez painting. The extraordinary works gathered for this rare solo exhibition test the absolute limits of representation and humanity. Velazquez searches not the corporeal world of humans but the ground of beliefs that makes us human. The Gallery Holt exhibition draws upon a particularly concentrated vein in the artist’s oeuvre resounding with the archaic formations of emotion and the enchantments of a future where feeling, faith, hope, rage, ruin, the poetic and the intended become form and object.

Over the past two decades, Velazquez' work has assumed epic proportions in terms of ambition, treatment and subject matter. Absolutely and at root a painter, Velazquez is internationally renowned as an individual and ambitious practitioner who has a profound respect for the potential of painting. First and foremost a philosophical painter, he acknowledges the primacy, not of art but of artists as the developers of the medium through generations.
For Velazquez the picture is not of a thing but an act. There are no nouns in his work only naming, touching but nothing to grasp – melody, but this is painting, silent and stoical. His memories traced as a remembering that boils to the surface and leaves it blistered.

Words sound hollow but the painted surface comes from before words, before objects and properties became twisted together. In the paintings the true superficiality of the physical world aches open.

Fernando Velazquez is also represented by Rosenberg + Kaufman, New York. His work has toured as a visual corollary to the music of George Crumb.