His Portraits

Alfredo’s eyes sharpen, as if he is about to answer an impertinent question:
– „How do you achieve the disquieting effect that your portraits are alive?“, is the ingenuous query.
Then the artist's eyes relaxe as he quips with his usual wry humor:
– „I don't do anything, my hand does it“, as though only his fingers work his magic, and faces mysteriously emerge.
However, Fernández y González is not a mere painter of faces. His art reaches beyond image and into the interior of his portraited subjects: the substance of their personalities, their madness, sufferings or anxieties.
Alfredo’s portraits strike the viewer as alive; perhaps it is his own reaction – his recognition of and identification with the deep human essence or the torments so vibrantly materialized through the artist's hand.
You have never met Alfredo’s model, yet you know him. – If the model is a friend, you are startled by the revelaton of the deep core of the person.
And if you are fortunate to be the portraited subject, Alfredo has extracted a self of which you were unaware, exposed a place within yourself you thought to be well disguised. Guided by his darkly intelligent eyes, Alfredo’s hand has unearthed barely perceptible passions you once hid for safe keeping and forgotten where you put them.

FLORA VOITEL