Fernando Robles is forty-nine years old and more than a painter, one could say that he is a traveler. Restless spirit, he throws questions to the world around him, and dissatisfied with the answers, he searches in and around himself, on a round trip, to solve the unknowns that he poses.
However, his travels are not confined to the world of imagination. From his distant Etchojoa in Sonora, he moved to the capital Hermosillo at the age of fifteen, and four years later we find him living in Guadalajara, where he discovers that painting is an exciting game and begins his professional career.
In 1977 he took the great leap and “crossed the pond”, settling in Paris. There he learns to ride a bicycle, and has not stopped using it since then; the bicycle transports you across the planet. From the Scandinavian fjords to the shores of the Mediterranean. He travels through Canada and the United States, and from San Diego down to Mexico City. From the capital, he wanders along unusual roads to the southeast, Central and South America, until he reaches Patagonia.
Every road is a return and Fernando always returns
I was born on November 21, 1948 in Huatabampo, Sonora. I was the first of four brothers - the second died and the other two live in Hermosillo. Raised the longest time of my childhood in the town of Etchojoa, I started as a painter or when I was eight years old on flour sacks. Crayons were my first encounter with color; contribution of coal and soot from my grandfather's stove. Then came the paintings of earth mixed in water in the set design workshop of the University of Sonora.
In 1969 I went to live in Guadalajara and there I discovered nibs, reds and nescafé. Also how fun blueprints can be. In that city I started or work on large-format canvases painted in acrylic.
Around 1977 I settled in Paris, and as a contribution to wandering around Europe, I began to experiment with printing inks, oils, pigments, pencils, scratches and scrapes. The old scenographic techniques that I learned in Sonora emerged as basic elements for my new works.
In 1979 he participated in the renowned International Painting Festival of CAGNES-SUR-MER, France, and obtained the first prize. Later on he exhibited his work in London, Lyon, Paris, Antibes, Bordeaux, Luxembourg, Chicago and Sao Paulo, and finally decided to return to Mexico.
In 1985 I returned to Guadalajara and I live in Chapala. Then I settled for the first time in Mexico City, where I did not finish drinking the hallucinated fountain of my land.
A retired painter from groups and props, Robles is like a sort of solitary navigator, attentive only to his creative activity; The experience acquired in his childhood made him lose respect for the materials and he rehearses the sculpture using kitchen tools: cheese scrapers, funnels, spoons, grinders, strains and, wonder, chicken bones!
Born and raised on the shores of the Sea of Cortez, Fernando absorbs in his pupils the intense blue of that sea and sky that he will later capture in his works.
Blue is the color that unites my childhood to the present, it is a color that ties the earth. Even in the whole range of ocher and among the grays of the trees it could hide this blue from the atmosphere.
A cordial personality, his painting shows that his intimate relationship with beings is the same as the one he has with things and with nature.
From his lonely sought after, his work exudes eloquence and hope. Robles's painting is a perpetual inventing the world.
The invention of my reality upon my arrival in Mexico in 1986, was a conjunction of intense experiences, definitive and amalgamated by the daily drama of this tentacular city: With my vision enriched by everything I experienced outside the country, I learned to give it a different value to the ever-present baggage of my roots.
The themes of my paintings do not have an immediate narrative sequence, each painting tells a story.
Learning to look at what I do teaches me to look at other painters of great chromatic richness without fanfare of seduction, from whom I learn something without ever avoiding their influence.
Source: Tips from Aeroméxico No. 6 Sonora / winter 1997-1998
