Fermín Ceballos, an art of patience
Fermín Ceballos - Drop / 2016 / Video-performance and drawing.
Fermín Ceballos is a multidisciplinary artist from the Dominican Republic working mainly with painting and performance, and occasionally with sculpture, installations, and video art. A native from San Cristóbal, a province in the south-west of the country, Fermín is an alumnus of the National School of Fine Arts of Santo Domingo. He later studied ceramics in Talleres Igneri. Presently, he lives and works in Cabrera, in the María Trinidad Sánchez province, on the north coast of our island.
His work has been regularly exhibited, in solo and collective expos, in the Dominican Republic, and many international venues. In 2013 he was invited as representative of the Dominican Republic at the “11th World Cultural Art Symposium” in the Mosan Art Museum, in Boryeong, Republic of Korea. In 2014, he was awarded the Eduardo León Jimenez art prize, one of the most prestigious art prizes in our country, for his performance “Acción para Buonarroti”. In this performance, armed with a hammer and a chisel, for a span of 16 days he shattered a block of marble, reducing it to dust and small fragments. This performance drew its essence from the phrase coined by the renaissance artist Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, hardly known as Buonarroti and predominantly known as Michelangelo, “Every block of stone has a statue inside, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it”. The following year, he was selected to participate in the Davidoff Art Initiative artist residency, at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany. He participated, in 2016, in the Fondation Clément collective exhibition “De lo Real a lo Imaginario” (From Reality to Fiction), in Martinica. In 2017, his work was included in "Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago”, at the Museum of Latin-American Art (MoLAA) in Los Angeles, California. This show was later on presented in other cities across the United States.
For his artwork, he draws from the topics of the emotional, psychological, and philosophical conflicts of life. In his artits statement, Ceballos points out that “My work contrasts with colonial stereotypical ideas about Caribbean’s art and artists. Although unintentionally, it questions the preconception of what artists are supposed to do because of their origin. Provoking what I think is an interesting, important, necessary discussion, and reflection about the idea of decolonization”. He continues, “Lately, thinking on the transience of things, especially life, I got interested in ideas that demands a lot of meticulous work, patience and the dedication of large periods of time, and that once completed get destroyed and irreversibly disappear”. One can experience this last aspect of his work with his performance “Drop”, 2016, where with the use of a water dropper he continually fills a cup exactly until it overflows. For each water droplet he drew a line with a pencil on a paper. It took him 10 uninterrupted hours to complete this work.
We invite you to indulge into the world of Fermín’s artwork, with this selection of images and videos of his performances kindly provided by the artist himself.
