Fernando Aranda
Mexican-Portuguese visual artist. He has a degree in Visual Arts from the Faculty of Arts and Design of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He completed a master’s degree in Painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Lisbon.
Fernando’s work focuses on two aspects of the natural landscape: on the one hand, in the search for the relationships in which the landscape affects individuals and communities based on phenomena such as the aesthetics of spirituality, deep ecology and cultural landscape, and on the other hand, the experimentation and plastic and visual variations to represent the experiences of the landscape.
Fernando has held eight individual exhibitions in Mexico and Portugal and has participated in more than 23 collective exhibitions. He also made different murals and artistic residencies in Portugal, Romania, Brazil, India and Mexico. He has been teaching arts in different academic levels for 10 years. He is a founding member of the Artivos, a cultural Portuguese association, whose mission is the integral and sustainable development of people and communities through the arts.
Currently he is a PhD student in Media – Arts at the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the Beira Interior University in Portugal and lives and works in Covilhã.
After Change
The artist and art teacher Fernando Aranda’s paintings speak about strong emotions. In the midst of the accelerated environmental and economic crisis of today’s world, ‘After Change’ proposes an alternative vision based on a deep recognition of the nature in ourselves. Showing the world as a Dymaxion projection, it seeks to deconstruct cultural interpretations of power such as top-down or north-south structures. Existence is dynamic, and so are the continents, diluted through the washes of ink, intertwined with trees that sustain them and that create a new existence where nature is ahead.