Collection: Rafael Fernandez

Originally from the city of Liège (Belgium), where he was born in 1966, Rafa has an extensive career behind him, he has worked for years with “Espacio Foto” (Madrid) and “El Arte de lo Imposible” (Gijón ). He currently works with the Lucía Dueñas Gallery (Oviedo). He has also had individual exhibitions at Mediadvanced (Gijón) and at the SegoviaFoto Festival at the Palacio de Quintanar. He has been part of numerous group shows, including those of various editions of the "Hablando en Plata Festival". His last collective 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, “American Way” opens an individual exhibition at the Old Jovellanos Institute in Gijón.

In his work, photography and travel go hand in hand. His words are defining in this regard: “ I have read that Annie Leibovitz remembered the long car trips with her family, traveling to the different destinations of her military father. He commented that the frame of the car window was his frame long before he had a camera in his hands. The same thing happened to me, through the window of my father's beetle I got used to seeing the world as we crossed half of Europe from my native Belgium to return to Asturias for vacations.”

Although he has traveled a lot of the world and has notable works from countries like Japan, his weakness is the United States. Perhaps it has to do with its various 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.