Sinag Fernandez

Search

'Search’, through painting, enshrines the divine by exploring how belief operates through haptic and bodily intimacy.

Hands, a key subject to invite the haptic, are an interface between worlds of matter and spirit, allowing one to be touched in the act of touching, to be contacted in the act of contacting. Touch heightens one’s sense of their body, the location of one’s fragments. When we lose our sense of touch and body-ness, we become intangible, spirit-like.

A consciousness of the body through touch-rituals and touch-gestures activates belief by creating efficacious intimacy, laying pathways for opening-towards and orienting-to the sacred. The corporeal body, profane and flawed, becomes essential to accessing what it can never fully embody, the perfect-transcendent-divine.

This complex relationship is examined across different modes of making: painting on textured rich canvases and minimal wood substrates, using grounding browns and glowing iridiscence, and considering scale in relation to one’s body.

As inquisitive offerings, these paintings unpack the how the divine relates to the flesh, the material, the intimate. 'Search' seeks to evoke spiritual reverence, position us as investigative, questioning believers, and invite us to behold these images indulgently, intimately, sacredly, and let us, fleshy bodies we are, be held divinely in turn.