Featured Artist Fermin Fleites

Artist Fermin Fleites imagines a world where diverse stories from different cultural groups converge, emphasizing the universality of human experience. See more of his work by visiting his website.

 

 

Imagine a world where we all have the same problems, but we name them differently. Imagine thousands of people calling the same God by different names and undertaking deeds in his honor. And imagine having the same concerns as the ancient inhabitants of Ethiopia or the current Machiguengas of the Urubamba River basin.

 

 

Welcome to the world we live in. A world in which the same stories are recovered again and again and intertwined. No matter how much artificial intelligence we may be training at this moment, at the core of this human is that same human who asked the sun for better harvests.

 

 

I present to you my work, a vision of art. It takes the perspective of cultural anthropology, from the barbarism of culture itself. A journey of discovery that began in a forgotten place in the Insular Caribbean, passing through the Peruvian Amazon, to reach the melting pot of today’s America.

 

 

In my work you can find experiences interacting with different cultural groups. There is the estrangement of the visitor who arrives. And the difficulty of the child who, not knowing how to read, is locked in a library where all the books tell a story and he must find out what story it is. Because in the end all stories are the same story.

 

 

You can also find a deep respect for technique and the habit of drawing everything. This is perhaps inspired by the Andean shamans who resist being photographed because it stops them. An original time where the past and the future are just nuances of a continuous present that is nowhere.

 

 

Thus, citing some examples, Story of a Fight against Demons. This  charcoal drawing is inspired by the story of a town that decides to move its church from its location (the coast) due to frequent attacks by demons. They do this without knowing that by moving it, they were carrying the demons with them. They carried them inside.

 

 

The sculpture titled The Winner is based on the figure of the ram and its founding character in the majority of cultural narratives. The Three Marys is a series of photographs based on three mothers. One is 102 years old, one is 33 years old and one is 13 years old. All these works mark cycles that open and close on themselves.

 

 

What comes into your hands is a kind of travel log of someone who watches us retrace the same cycle of time over and over again. A kind of visual memory of memories, interspersed with symbols. I invite you to immerse yourself in this universe of events with crossed times. It is not strange to end at the beginning and there is nothing but stories, hundreds of stories and interwoven stories.

 

 

Compiling stories will always have an implicit share of arrogance, since you run the risk of leaving out important details. Intertwining them, on the other hand, will always allow you to move as if inside a labyrinth. Where each route comes to an end, hundreds of other routes unfold. And that is the spirit with which I would like you to look at this work. To understand it, you will have to take hold of your own ball and enter the labyrinth.

 

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