FERNBERGER

Fernberger is pleased to present La Fiaca, a solo exhibition of recent paintings and a new installation by the multidisciplinary artist Alina Perkins. In her native Argentina, fiaca is a term used to describe a blissful, nourishing idleness—an introspective pace and productive space that she embraces to pursue intellectual meditation and creative invention. Her resulting artworks are portals into alternate, though familiar, realities—resisting the literal and functional, welcoming the surreal and sensorial.

While developing this series, Perkins studied the writings of the Marxist theorist Paul Lafargue and the Argentinian painter Florencio Molina Campos. While reading Lafargue’s treatise The Right to Be Lazy (1883), she connected with the author’s anti-capitalist belief that leisure should be a human right rather than a class privilege. Exploring Molina Campos’s bucolic, low-horizon landscapes, Perkins savored his characterization of gauchos: Argentinian cowboys of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who roamed and tilled the land of the Pampas—a region of Argentina known for its vast grasslands—whose leisurely gate and nomadic path became fixtures of South American folk legend.

She layers her canvases with blurred, chalky brushstrokes in verdant shades of red, orange, green, and yellow, and dusty tones of purple, blue, ivory, and slate. Each painting portrays an ambiguous object, scene, or vista: an egg seated on a plush cushion, a knife pierced into a lush field, a book open to a blank page. These symbols quietly reference her research, communicating a feeling of, rather than a translation of, various philosophical, political, and supernatural phenomena. Her titles, such as Siesta and Camino, conjure gentle, contemplative gestures. She encourages her audience to rest their eyes on, and release themselves to, her hazy scenes—soft-focus visions open to interpretation.

Alina Perkins (b. 1984) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Perkins has studied at Licenciatura en Artes Visuales, Buenos Aires, and most recently with Monika Baer at the Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt, Germany. Recent group exhibitions include Free Energy, Zodiac Pictures, Los Angeles (2023), SALON, Amor Corp, Los Angeles (2022); Love Song, Sarah Brooke Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); TEKNOLUST: OBJECTOPHILIC FUTURES, Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong (2021); Bar, Commercial Street, Los Angeles (2020).

Alina Perkins’ practice consists of sculpture, painting, and performance. Drawing from literature and cinema, Perkins depicts recognizable motifs but places them in a space that is ambiguously defined, suggesting the margins of another world. Figures appear and recede — sometimes merging with one another. The blurry edges of their forms nearly touch but resist confinement. Existing between figuration and abstraction, her compositions evoke a dream state or the sensation of a hazy memory. Objects take on new meaning, elements are substituted, perhaps to suggest the arbitrary nature of being. With an interest in the metaphysical, the esoteric, and the psychoanalytic, Perkins creates work that land somewhere between the real and the unreal.

Alina Perkins (b. 1984) lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Perkins has studied at Licenciatura en Artes Visuales, Buenos Aires, and most recently with Monika Baer at the Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Frankfurt, Germany. Recent group exhibitions include Free Energy, Zodiac Pictures, Los Angeles (2023), SALON, Amor Corp, Los Angeles (2022); Love Song, Sarah Brooke Gallery, Los Angeles (2021); TEKNOLUST: OBJECTOPHILIC FUTURES, Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong (2021); Bar, Commercial Street, Los Angeles (2020).