Carlos Fer

How do you hang a painting? This question has been the focus of Carlos Fer’s work in recent years. How a painting is hung fundamentally transforms what it communicates, how the viewer perceives it, and its relationship to itself and the space it occupies. His offering is based on reinterpreting the act of hanging a painting on the wall, turning it into an impossible feat. The resulting project, Exercises for Hanging a Painting, proposes an interconnected and interdependent system that charts various ways a painting can be created, stored, painted, displayed, hung, dropped or cease to be. By doing so, the artist alludes to the well-known domino and butterfly effects, whereby one action inevitably triggers a chain of events that in turn generate others, spreading rhizomatically through space.

Biography

Carlos Fer (Tui, 1997) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher. His current project explores folds in contemporary painting as part of his PhD in Creation and Research at the University of Vigo (UVIGO). He has taught at the La Rioja School of Design (ESDIR), the Pablo Picasso School of Art and Design (EASD), and the Pontevedra Faculty of Fine Arts. He is a member of the dx5 research group, whose initiatives have received support from institutions such as the Government of Galicia and the Pontevedra Provincial Council. His work has been displayed in cities such as Bilbao, Luxembourg and Lisbon, has received national awards, and forms part of several collections. He has also participated in artistic residencies in Brussels, Madrid and Galicia, at which he has exhibited the soft qualities that define painting and its shifting boundaries.

Carlos Fer is a recipient of the New Values residency programme, a collaboration between the Pontevedra Provincial Council and the Matadero Madrid Centre for Artists in Residence.