FIU Frost — Agustín Fernández: The Alluring Power of Ambiguity
Written By Olga Garcia-Mayoral
On view: February 15, 2025-January 25, 2026 | Site visit: October 26, 2025
Standing in the first gallery at the Frost, you feel Agustín Fernández pull two magnets in opposite directions–flesh and mechanism, ache and elegance, seduction and restraint. The surfaces are satiny, almost inhaled; the forms are knotted, pinned, cinched, sliced. It’s a language at once intimate and armored, a non-dualist grammar that refuses to choose between figuration and abstraction. Curated by Elizabeth T. Goizueta with assistance from Gabriela Goizueta, The Alluring Power of Ambiguity is less a linear retrospective than a lucid anthology of Fernández’s obsession: bodies that masquerade as objects, objects that vibrate with sentience, and desire treated not as illustration but as structure.
Born in Havana in 1928 and trained at San Alejandro (with formative detours to the Arts Students League in New York and Madrid’s Real Academia), Fernández left Cuba for Paris in 1959 and would never return to live on the island. The exhibition tracks that peripatetic trajectory–Paris, San Juan, New York–without reducing the work to biography. Instead, it tunes us how exile recalibrates seeing. The monochromes (and near-monochromes) that define much of his mature work push against the color-saturated “Cuban canon,” as the museum’s notes put it, and that resistance reads as productive friction: a refusal to be summarized by palette. Fernández subtracts color to sharpen anatomy–not literal anatomy, but the touch, pressure and restraint.
Seduction as Structure
Across more than 65 works–paintings, drawings, collages, portfolios–the exhibition makes a crisp case for Fernández as both “painter of the brush” and draftsman of uncommon bite. A room of drawings reveal his precision with the line: folded paper that seems to crease as you watch; pins, hooks, belts and spikes that operate like punctuation marks, toggling tensions between the seen and the implied. The “tool” motifs are not props; they are syntax. They bind, puncture, fasten; they also tease. In painting, his gloved grays and metallic creams glow like skin under studio lights, while hard edges and ligatures interrupt the caress.
The erotics is never simply illustrative. Fernández stages the conditions for desires–veils and un-veils, tugs and releases–inside the picture plane. In one large canvas, ribbons and belts gather into a torqued knot that reads as both ligament and lacing. You sense muscles preparing to flex even though there are no bodies depicted–only intimation of them, abstracted into pulls and counter-pulls. Elsewhere, a field of soft gradation is cut by a glossy seam with acuity of a scalpel. You can almost feel the coolness of the surface where the brush has polished a highlight to metal.
Materials, Methods, and the Pleasure of Control
If Fernández’s visual language seduces, his technique closes the deal. The paintings’ “finish”– that sleek, buffed, nearly industrial skin–carries a paradoxical warmth. Up close, you find the trace of the hand: tight modulations, slight burrs where once glaze meets another, the faint tremor of a hairline. The show smartly pairs paintings and drawings so viewers can triangulate how a hook in graphite becomes a hinge in oil, or how a receding gradient in pencil rehearses a large swoon on linen.
Equally strong is the curatorial emphasis on ephemera: letters, photographs, and studio notes that widen the aperture on Fernández’s process and psyche. They are not mere supplements. They materialize the world in which the paintings were possible–the friends, the debts, the nights and jobs that funded the days in the studio. A vitrine of clippings from Paris in the 60’s sits near later New York snapshots; together they chart a life lived inside international avant-gardes without surrendering to any one school.
Dialogues and Lineages
The wall texts sketch Fernández’s influences–surrealism’s charged objects, post-Minimalism’s cool rigor, even traces of downtown New York’s punk attitude–yet what’s striking is how fully he metabolized them. The surrealist legacy appears not as dream iconography but as the psychic weight of things; the post-Minimal turns up not as a unit/repeat modules but as an ethic of surface and discipline. And the “punk” is less about noise than stance: a refusal to behave, to please, to be decoded quickly.
That stance is especially resonant in Miami, a city where Cuban modernisms are often (mis)read through tropes of tropical color and nostalgia. The Frost’s thesis–that Fernández monochrome and surgical, sits apart from that expectation–feels right. But the exhibition also positions him inside a broader conversation about the body in late modernism: how artists in the 1960s-80s contended with desire and control, violence and care, in the wake of both historical trauma and new sexual politics. In Fernández, the wounded and the polished share a skin.
Fashion as Afterimage
One of the most engaging surprises is a custom dress by designer Fernando Pena, commissioned after one of Fernández’s iconic paintings. The garment sits like a mirage between sculpture and apparel: seams echo canvas ligatures; a bodice folds with the logic of his drawn paper; the palette stays loyal to his disciplined grays. Rather than costume the art, the dress translates it –re-engineering pictorial tensions as patternmaking problems. It’s a deft curatorial gesture, especially in Miami, where fashion is often spectacle; here, it becomes exegesis. You see how Fernández’s forms want to move on bodies, not just in the mind.
The Mind on the Page: Memoir and Voice
Alongside the artworks, the exhibition includes an unpublished memoir, Adiós al barroco. Detailing about his human experience in Cuba from childhood to early adulthood. Fernández delves into this artistic practice, literacy influences and the friendships he fostered throughout his career. Also dedicating a chapter to New York City’s photographer Robert Mapplethrope, whose demise from AIDS was a devastating loss for both himself and his wife Lisa. Later Fernández’s re-examins his life from the context of ancient civilizations of Mexico.
That caveat aside, the memoir’s presence matters. It frames Fernández’s not only as an image-maker but as a thinker of images–someone for whom ambiguity is not a pose but an ethic.
Ambiguity, Read for a New Generation
The exhibition title earns its keep. In 2025, ambiguity is not always alluring in public life; we are trained to demand declarations. Fernández insists on the opposite: that ambiguity can be a site of intimacy and rigor. The show is careful not to reduce his knots and clamps to allegories of exile (though they can be read that way). Instead, it gives multiple entry points–material, erotic, historial–so new audiences in Miami can triangulate their own readings. Teens admiring the ephemera of the legacy, a couple debated whether a painting’s central pinch was a space, unhurried sightlines–lets those debates breathe.
Framing, Not Freezing, a Legacy
The Frost is an important site for Fernández’s. Its 1992 retrospective helped anchor his presence in Miami institutional memory; this exhibition deepens that commitment while updating the conversation. Works from estate, private collections, and the museum’s holdings–many never exhibited–are the show’s ballast. Together they extend a thesis: Fernández belongs to a transnational modernism that is at once Cuban and unbound, Latin American and global, erotic and ascetic.
What lingers after the walkthrough is the sense that ambiguity here is not fog but focus. Fernández asks us to attend–to surfaces, seams, restraints, releases. He insists that desire is a form of knowledge and that control, when tenderly applied, can be a kind of care. For audiences encountering him for the first time, that proposition lands with clarity. For those returning, it feels like permission to keep looking.
Closing Thought
Fernández once described himself first and last as a painter–a vocation of patience and exactitude. That feels right in these rooms, where ambiguity is engineered with the care of a tailor and the courage of a surgeon. The allure is real, but so is the power: a steady voltage running through the belts and seams, through grays that smolder. The guest curatorial team did an outstanding collaboration showcasing the legacy of this Cuban painter. In a city that loves the declarative, this exhibition is an argument for the whisper—and the long look. For Miami’s expanding audiences–students, designers, artists, collectors–this exhibit offers a rigorous alternative genealogy of Cuban and Latin American modernism, one that privileges discipline, ambiguity and the erotics of form over easy brightness.
