In her paintings, Veronica Fernandez creates oneiric and tender scenes that are drawn from childhood memory. Oftentimes old photographs of relatives and friends act as the starting point from which the artist begins her process of world-building. Fernandez’ practice is informed by the financial difficulty her family experienced during her upbringing as they moved across the East Coast in temporary housing solutions. Her figures are animated in detailed impasto brushwork, and they exist in moody renderings of real spaces: motel rooms, parks and sidewalks. In vivid, evocative washes of colour, these otherwise impersonal spaces are charged with emotion. They are either intimate and domestic moments, tightly framed and spatially shallow, or fields that are expansive and surreal.
Fernandez’ psychological portraits narrate biography, family, dreams and fears, with each work offering an empathetic insight into a moment of tension or resourcefulness. The children find their own small joys to entertain themselves with, or without proper support they learn to care for one another through accidents and injuries. Though the parental figures in Fernandez’ paintings are often absent from the pictorial frame, or present but otherwise caught in their own moments of struggle, these scenes are understanding, presenting negligence as part of a wider social issue. The motifs in Fernandez’ paintings are abstracted and fantastical in nature, and at their core is a sensitive and compassionate understanding of inequality in the United States.