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Veronica Fernandez Paints Childhood Memories into Records of Resilience

At Anat Ebgi, the artist revisits childhood precarity in psychologically dense canvases that collapse past and present to consider how memory is rebuilt, erased and reinhabited.

We all carry some degree of trauma from the years when we were growing up. Facing it and reconciling with it—and, in some cases, forgiving our parents—is a necessary part of the identity-making process. Some situations, however, are harder to metabolize than others. Raised by a single father, the artist Veronica Fernandez and her family endured periods of homelessness, moving between temporary housing situations. These formative experiences—marked by vulnerability, adaptability and resilience—shaped the artist’s sensitivity to environment and belonging, informing her entire artistic universe.

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Though rooted in personal history, Fernandez’s painted scenes are characterized by an unfinished quality and subtle irreality, allowing the emotional narratives depicted to remain open-ended, with new elements fluidly blending and interacting with the original points of anchorage. These residues of memory flow into the work in “Prey,” her latest show with Anat Ebgi, resulting in vivid scenes shaped by pressure and proximity. Ghostly figures alternate with sharper flashes of detail, as if fragments of the past were resurfacing. They move within dramatically chaotic environments that reflect the absence of stable reference points while growing up, but also the ability to embrace that instability as an open field of possibility.

These new works feel denser, both psychologically and symbolically. The storytelling remains rich in symbolism that spontaneously resurfaces from the subconscious, but Fernandez’s work feels more deliberate, more fully considered, as the scenes unfold slowly through the many details concentrated in these smaller-scale canvases.

Fernandez has long gravitated toward epic, large-scale canvases, but her recent move to a studio apartment challenged her to work in more contained formats. “I’ve always loved that scale, but when I moved here, I wanted to challenge myself to make works that would actually fit in the studio I have now,” Fernandez told Observer when we caught up before the exhibition’s opening. “That meant getting really tiny brushes and, in a way, relearning how to paint. I wasn’t used to working within such a confined space, and compositionally it became a whole new problem: how am I going to place this? How do I build that? How do I navigate the surface when everything is compressed?”

The only large painting in “Prey” is also the one that leans most fully into that allegorical register. This powerful two-panel horizontal work functions like a portal, where children are thrown into it—or can return from the past. Titled Some Things Don’t Stay For Tomorrow, it features a group of kids waiting for something, holding onto one another in the snow, then dancing around a luminous, fire-lit landscape at sunset while fireworks burst along the ground and ghostly presences emerge from purple smoke. A monumental tree anchors the scene, holding together the multiple spatial and emotional layers it carries.

Fernandez has been trying to understand how to hold different emotional states—sometimes contradictory ones—within a single pictorial plane. How can tenderness and heartbreak coexist in the same image? That question helps explain why some of the paintings appear fragmented, as if cut open, punctured by portals or animated by sudden shifts in movement. These compositional ruptures give form to the oscillation that has always coursed through her work, now rendered more explicitly as movement between emotional registers.

This collapsing of memories from different moments finds an even more vortical intensity in the purple-toned Lost Foundation (No One to Share the Memory), as if propelled by centrifugal force. Children climb up and down the canvas, circling the central image of an entire family crowded onto a single mattress. The painting was the first Fernandez made for this body of work. “I was visiting my dad—I go to his place on the weekends—and I was sitting at his dining room table, working on these small paintings. That one came out of that space, both physically and emotionally,” she recalled. She wanted the painting to hold the sense that someone had been there before, in that abandoned lot or construction site. “These kids are playing on top of it. It made me think about how people are always moving, how spaces are constantly being layered with different lives, and how that connects us in ways we don’t always see.”

As in earlier works, she often depicts children as lonely, bewildered and vulnerable—or as fiercely engaged in some form of resistance to what unfolds around them. Yet their primary form of resistance is imagination, which allows them to slip into the alternate realms it opens. In translating this layered perception of reality, color is central to Fernandez’s practice. Her canvases blaze with pigment, flashing and radiating from the surface. Color reshapes the scene, defines the figures and gradually overtakes the underlying drawing. Her approach demonstrates a precise understanding of the emotional and psychological force of color.

The palette also reinforces this sense of looming drama and imminent tragedy in the works. Yet she never makes that tension the sole focus of the scene. Instead, she introduces playful elements that complicate the mood, and her paintings inhabit a tragicomic register that recalls how a child experiences family crisis—aware that something is wrong, yet unable to fully grasp its weight or anticipate its consequences.

For this reason, although certain objects and situations are rendered in hyper-detailed ways to fulfill specific symbolic functions, they seem to slip out of objective reality, suspended in an in-between dimension that intersects the conscious and the unconscious. The effect resembles the psychological state of visualizing or dreaming with your eyes open, or the disorienting flicker of déjà vu. In their violent, surreal tonalities, these elements read simultaneously as ominous premonitions and revelatory hallucinations.

Central to this dynamic is her largely intuitive and highly experimental approach to painting, which pushes its expressive limits and allows figures to surface and dissolve in a process akin to memory work—layering, erasing, reconfiguring. “I love taking the risk of kind of destroying the painting at some point,” she said. “Because then you add more layers, and it just looks better underneath.”

In Chased Through the Night, a painting particularly stratified in its thick impasto and layered texture, the composition began in a much simpler form. “The only thing I had was the figure on a tree and dogs coming toward it,” she said. “There were no other figures. There wasn’t a dog at the bottom with that flashlight-type shadow. It was just the two dogs jumping at the tree and the figure.” At one point, there was even a playground in the foreground with a merry-go-round and other elements. “I ended up painting all over it,” she recalled. The painting had to be undone to become itself.

In person, the works carry a pronounced physicality. The surfaces are dense and materially charged. “They feel very chalky and tacky-looking,” she notes. “With the layering of the trees—and the bed in this one—there are a lot of textured areas.” The thickness of the paint amplifies the emotional gravity of the scenes. These are not simply images but constructed environments, built and rebuilt until the surface holds the full sediment of its revisions.

At the same time, the question of perspective is equally layered in the interplay of gazes and consciousness. Is she looking back at childhood from the present, or attempting to re-enter that earlier body? “I think it’s a little bit of both,” she said. “When I made the painting, I imagined future characters—people playing on a construction site. It’s thinking about the past and present at the same time.” The scenes carry autobiographical residue—shared mattresses, precarious domestic spaces—but they are not sealed within personal memory. “How do I make it feel like a memory,” she asks, “even if it’s not your memory? How do I make people feel nostalgic about this specific perspective?”

Notably, most of Fernandez’s works originate in her poems, which allow her to expand personal experience into a broader reflection on the contemporary human condition. She describes writing as the invisible thread linking suppressed thoughts drawn from lived experience to the psychological imagery of the canvases. “The poetry and note-taking is a crucial aspect of my practice because it allows me to dive deeply into the subconscious, uneasy parts of myself that I didn’t realize make me feel so deeply; the medium, however, somehow, it allows that apprehensive world to become a semi-safe one to dip my toe into.” Drawings often accompany these poems, functioning as thought bubbles or visual reflections. “They generally are the stepping stone to which I am able to connect the fleeting memories with the larger works that ground those intimate ideas more universally and offer more paths for the viewer to embrace,” she explained. “As an artist whose practice stems from my own encounters in the world, it’s important for me to digest first what I value in the experiences I’ve had and grapple with them myself.”

Despite the level of surrealism, it is impossible to ignore how the scenes Fernandez depicts are firmly rooted in the daily lives of Latinos in the U.S., drawing from the neighborhoods and communities where she grew up. They confront the hard truths of contemporary life in poorer urban areas, exposing widening gaps between social groups in an often unforgiving system of privilege and uneven wealth distribution.

That may be why her works feel especially resonant and timely amid recent events of mass deportations and ICE raids targeting these communities. Teaching on the side, Fernandez confesses she has heard stories from students about classmates who simply stopped coming to school. “It was so hard over the summer,” she reflected, “thinking about how dangerous it felt.” The idea of hiding, of being forced to conceal one’s identity or physically withdraw from public life, filters into the paintings’ overlooked corners. “A lot of people are in hiding now. You’re forced to hide your identity, and sometimes physically hide so you don’t get taken.” The landscapes she paints—construction sites, peripheral lots, motels—are transitional spaces that already speak of precarity, but also resilience.

Still, as Fernandez clarifies, her work is never limited to simply representing what it means to be Latina. “It took me a long time to understand that Latinos in the U.S. are not a monolith. For many like myself, whose identities are in the misunderstood in-between space, not everybody is going to accept me for who I am or understand where I come from. A lot of my identity and what I value has been sculpted by the experiences I’ve gone through, so I just try to share what feels most honest to me.” Imagination remains a counterforce, evident in the resilience and vitality of the children she paints. Let the kids play—let the kids imagine. “You always had to transcend from the drama and look at it with the playfulness of a kid.”

The only sculptural assemblage in the show, Play (2026), fully embodies this playful creativity that—in line with rachequismo—can re-enchant the world, transforming humble materials and leftovers into something unexpected. “That sculpture was so fun to make,” she said. “It felt good to experiment again.” Using a wooden dresser, coat tree and hangers as its primary structure, Fernandez creates whimsical, plant-like forms from which she suspends the fragile brown paper bags she once used to carry her lunch to school. By filling the paper forms with resin, she renders them leathery and skin-like; what once appeared disposable becomes a protective casing. The details deepen this domestic archaeology: crocheted hangers, drawers stuffed with lottery tickets, scratch-offs, a slinky, unpaid bills, loose wires—objects pulled from a “catch-all” drawer. “It was almost like I had to play in order to make the sculpture play.”

Her work is animated by the possibility of re-enchanting the world through imagination and, with it, reimagining one’s fate—slipping beyond fixed consciousness to inhabit that liminal, fluid zone where everything still feels possible, before and beyond the grind of everyday pressures, through creativity and vision.

Drawn from a poem she wrote while developing the series, the exhibition’s title reveals the broader tension animating the work: vulnerability and urgency, prey and predator. The figures that inhabit these scenes hover at that threshold—defenseless yet alert, threatened yet imaginative—occupying the fragile space between exposure and reinvention. “Prey,” according to the artist, is meant not only in a personal sense but within a broader social structure. “There are all these forces and factors stopping you from being at a certain point,” she reflected. “It’s almost like everyone involved becomes prey—to whatever actors of the universe or society are keeping them defenseless, or making them feel like they always have to catch up.”

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