José Gómez Sicre introduced Fernández as “one of the most promising of the generation of modern artists of Cuba formed of painters and sculptors under 30” at the time of his solo exhibition at the Pan American Union—his first in the United States— in 1954. Fernández settled near New York’s Washington Square in 1972, following an extended transatlantic journey that bridged Havana, Paris, and Puerto Rico, and began to absorb the grittiness of the emerging downtown scene into an already dark, eroticized iconography. Earlier and ongoing series probed the tactile and metaphoric anatomies of armor plates, beehives, and cherries, among other subjects, drawing upon the annals of Surrealism and the frankly sexual bodies of contemporary post-minimalism. Allusive and psychological, these paintings render desire through (partial) body and flesh, sheathed and yet vulnerable, sublimating emotions of longing not only carnal, but inseparable from the psychosomatic pain of his exile from Cuba. Las tres gracias characteristically inflects an aloof, polymastic armature with a classical referent, in this case the mythological and eternally youthful daughters of Zeus—Euphrosyne, Thalia, and Aglaia—said to embody grace, beauty, and charm. Fernández distills their traditional femininity into three sets of breasts, recalling his ongoing series Atenea polimastia, which suggestively populate the front of an armor plate, at once hypererotic and uncannily all-seeing. An interested observer of the leather subculture during this period, a curiosity further stimulated by his friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe, whom he met in the late 1970s, Fernández painted numerous armors and breastplates, such as The Warrior (1975) and La Grande Armour (1975), alongside belts, straps, and other intimations of male eroticism.
Agustín Fernández born in Havana, studied at the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes San Alejandro from 1946 to 1950 and briefly at the Art Students League of New York under the direction of George Grosz and Yasuo Kuniyoshi from 1948 to 1949. Following his first solo exhibition, at Havana’s Lyceum (1951), he exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, including at the Pan American Union (Agustín Fernández: 15 Paintings) in 1954. He received an Honorable Mention at the IV São Paulo Bienal in 1957 for Still Life and Landscape (1956), subsequently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1959 Fernández accepted a scholarship to study painting in Europe and departed for Paris the following year. Fernández came into contact with late Surrealism while in Paris and his work began to explore increasingly visceral and obsessively erotic subjects. His palette shifted from the cool, melancholic color of his Cuban years to intimate shades of beige in works such as Developpment d’un Delire (1961). In the numerous series of black and white paintings that followed, Fernández combined geometric forms with suggestive, at times sadomasochistic imagery in ways conversant with contemporary postminimalism. His black-and-white period continued through his years in San Juan (1968-1972) and informed new work in serigraphy, notably an edition of twenty collages for which he received a Mention at the Tercera Bienal de San Juan del Grabado Latinoamericano y del Caribe in 1973. Fernández settled permanently in New York in 1972, and his later paintings reintroduced color, typically in series—e.g., armors, belts, butterflies, snakes, femmes-oiseaux—and with underlying psychosexual innuendo. He began a new series of sculptural objects in the 1990s, reprising earlier experiments with the Surrealist “found object” from the mid-1960s. In 1992 he completed his unpublished memoirs, in which he wrote at length about his friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. Fernández received a CINTAS Foundation Fellowship in 1978.
