Before, During, and AFTER:

The scene that haunts me is the following: on his way to work, while crossing a bridge in the rain, a professor stops a young woman from jumping. After that—and after the book he finds with the girl—nothing will ever be the same.

I have the feeling of having met Fernanda—certainly not at the edge of an abyss—but at an important turn along her path. I first became acquainted with her work in encaustic: wide horizons, delicate, precise, subtle. Two days later, I met her: gesturing, hair tied with a wide band, restless. If the artist's urgency and agitation were not present in the contemplation and expanded time of the artwork I had seen, they were present in what she was about to tell me.

In that meeting, the Migrações [Migrations], with their respective geographical coordinates—as she names these works, indicating the precise viewpoint of each horizon—were not, contrary to what I thought, on the agenda. Fernanda wanted to talk about an urgent project, still close to landscape, still toxic or arduous due to its supports, yet a project that demanded she violently shift her position in relation to her own output. She was facing a risk, and she did not back down.

In the exhibition Depois: what one sees are some of those encaustic works aligned along a single, continuous horizon, as if they could expand indefinitely, alongside five corten steel cubes of varying sizes and conditions. On all of these cubes—one opened in a cross upon the gallery floor, another fully welded, two on the verge of closing, and another twisted after being dropped from a helicopter!—Fernanda oxidizes those very same horizons that we find in her encaustic works.

Encapsulating the landscape in a geometric solid—its horizon—and then dropping this object from a helicopter is a radical attitude, a gesture that allows for a wide array of interpretations and approaches. My initial reading—because everything is so new: the work, the artist, the flight—is that all of this leaves an imprint. That is to say, the corten steel, so significant in the recent history of art; the oxidized landscape whose reference is no longer nature's horizon, but that of her own previous work; the negotiations to carry the object on a flight and then drop that weight from the sky—all of this is impregnated within the work.

The indefinite expansion of horizons in Fernanda's work is taking place in the present moment. And this involves the literal contraction of the landscape into cubic secrets—objects that encounter the world filled with truth.