That Slippery Moment
Growing up in Colombia as the oldest child of two chemical engineers, Gonzalo Fuenmayor's, MFA '04, parents demanded academic rigor and a successful career from their son. He attended business school for three years to appease them, but he felt miserable.
"This can't be my life. I can't do this," he said to himself over and over. "Then I rebelled."
He applied to visual arts schools because he had always loved drawing and, despite a lack of experience, was admitted to the School of Visual Arts for a BFA. He arrived in Manhattan determined to succeed as a professional artist — and quickly.
"I didn't want to fall into the cliche of the struggling artist. I wanted to be an entrepreneur doing something that I love,” Fuemayor says.
He was pulled towards doing work that explored concepts of scale and quickly defined himself as a painter, giving the medium a myopic focus. An MFA at SMFA was the next step. At first, he was overwhelmed by the fluidity of the curriculum, but then he pivoted and made the experience his own.
"I started taking video classes, history of performance, installation, things that felt very random at the time but made sense in the end. It's all fed into my practice in mysterious and unexpected ways," Fuenmayor says.
He was one of just a handful of international students at that moment in the school's history. He felt pressured to make art that bought into cliches of what a Colombian artist would be concerned about and gave American viewers comfortable entry points through predictable stereotypes.
Fuenmayor began creating vivid, large-scale paintings of bananas — a tropical fruit native to Colombia and exported to North America — initially as a joke. His thesis, which brought together a series of them, was playfully titled Slip.
Perversely, giving in to those perceived viewer expectations was what initially gave him the launchpad he needed to propel his practice. "As much as I've been trying to run away from it, paradoxically, I've been using it as well," he says.
After SMFA, he went to New York City and tried to "make it" as an artist. "Making it consisted of having a studio, having a day job teaching painting, and spending every weekend in the studio." After getting married and moving to Miami, he couldn't find a job and decided to take a financial gamble and work as a full-time artist.
It paid off. "I started making drawings in my living room and at the dining room table, and then I started teaching remote drawing classes and hustling,” Fuenmayor says. “Suddenly and magically–I have to say, magically. Because there's no other way to say–I started selling more and more things, and then I got a gallery in Miami."
These days, he's represented by four: Dot Fiftyone Gallery in Miami, Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco, and Galería El Museo/Fernando Pradilla, with spaces in both Bogotá and Madrid. He has since had solo shows at MFA, Boston and Galería El Museo in Bogotá and published a retrospective book. But even with these accolades, Fuenmayor says it's a daily struggle to hustle and support his family in Miami.
Years ago, he essentially stopped working in color and switched to monochrome drawings–initially because it was cheaper to draw than to paint. Yet, the choice was also purposeful. Viewers expected a Latino artist's work to hit them in the face with spicy colors.
"The gesture of avoiding the cultural expectations of color from my palette was a big issue. I'm trying to trick you, the viewer, and not assign a specific identity to the work by making it black and white," Fuemayor says. "Yet, at the same time, I'm exaggerating and making fun of palm trees, bananas, toucans, and all the stereotypes people use."
Although he primarily works in drawing, Fuemayor still classifies his work as paintings because he employs a painter's eye and techniques to achieve them.
It all circles back to Slip in many ways, too. Fuemayor explains, "I carefully compose my imagery to create that slippery moment where you think that you know what you're looking at, and then voluntarily you can slip into other conversations, either historical, cultural, or political."
Although he cares about succeeding financially, the market is irrelevant the moment he steps inside his studio at 9 am sharp, five days a week. He makes the work that drives him and worries about whether the concept is solid or sellable afterward. "I have to be creative and take risks with my practice," he shrugs.
Fuenmayor swivels his iPhone camera to show the studio behind him where he's working on multiple pieces at once, batching the stages to be more efficient, a marathon of researching images online, cutting paper panels, and taping them together one day, tracing images in ink the next, and finally the charcoal, all the way through his process.
Disco balls, cheetah pelts, and ornate baroque interiors dance across all of them in black and white charcoal, but in the corner is a single painting–a larger-than-life canvas that barely clears the metal roof. A disco ball has crashed into a bed of emerald green palm leaves and refuses to blend in with the others. Fuemayor thinks of painting as an indulgence at this point.
"I hadn't painted in a while and made the biggest painting I could in bright colors–very Miami. It barely fits in my studio. It's like a bastard of sorts," he says guiltily.
