Downtown Vegas (Las Vegas) - 2015

Rafa Fernandez

Originally from the city of Liege (Belgium), where he was born in 1966, Rafa has a long career behind him, having worked for years with "Espacio Foto" (Madrid) and "El Arte de lo Imposible" (Gijón). He is currently working with the Lucía Dueñas Gallery (Oviedo). He has also had solo exhibitions at Mediaadvanced (Gijón) and at the SegoviaFoto Festival at the Palacio de Quintanar. He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions, including several editions of the "Festival Hablar en Plata". His last group exhibition "The great book of the world. A decade of photography in Asturias" was presented at the Juan Barjola Museum (Gijón) in April 2021. Also in 2021 he inaugurates the solo exhibition "American Way" at the Antiguo Instituto Jovellanos in Gijón.

In his work, photography and travel go hand in hand. Her words are defining in this regard: "I have read that Annie Leibovitz remembered the long car trips with her family, touring the different destinations of her military father. She commented that the car window frame was her frame long before she had a camera in her hands. It was the same for me, through the window of my father's Beetle I got used to seeing the world as we drove halfway across Europe from my native Belgium to return to Asturias on vacation."

Although he has traveled the world extensively and has notable works from countries such as Japan, his weakness is the United States. Perhaps it has to do with his varied musical and artistic references, all of them directly linked to this nation: jazz and blues; the photography of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand and William Eggleston, among many others; and the hyperrealist painting of the second half of the 20th century by authors such as John Baeder or Richard Estes.