We are, once again, before the works of one of the veteran artists of this gallery, where perhaps it has astonished us approximately twelve times. We are, in front of the pictorial work of Leonardo Fernandez, a person from Malaga who was born with a brush in the hand and that it has managed so much in the pictures of its ground as in those of the north of Africa, both in the location and in the courtyards of Seville, Malaga or Cordoba, both in its flowers and in these faucets that always flow with fresh water, to gather of subtle form and simultaneously alive, the sun and the light of the ground and the sea, with a naturalness and a freshness that art and salt leak for four sides.

He is one of the big ones of the Malaga and Andalusian art long ago, for its own style and its unbeatable skill in developing its inn, its flowers, its courtyard, its sources, its childre’s portraits, and for this another way of facing simultaneously the nearby work and the scenery of fund, dividing the scene, as the modern theatrical directors would do or as it did the big Velazquez in its christ’s famous picture in the house of Marta and Maria.

Leonardo feels it wide ones before urban and rural sceneries, or as he feels before these Arabic zocos of the north of Africa, obtaining a few compositions that are, just as much of the moment, like a homage species to big artists of other epochs, achieving of a very palpable form a proper coloring and a luminosity of its ground, and more specifically than its native Malaga. Authentic evocative masterpieces of times and ancestral customs beatific simplicity of the rural sceneries or of these courtyards where the lemon tree blooms.

Since he was 9 years old it has the brushes in the hands, and has been able to join the wise mastery achieved in the course of time with the impeccable skill of the one who has studied thoroughly all that it realizes. It is verstile one, both as for the topics that it chooses and in the way of focusing them, and there are always a success, and without he having never remained classified. But it is when it paints the water when its work comes to the maximum naturalness levels, when it achieves that ist moisture goes so far as to impregnate the material that the painter uses, which the freshness of pipes sources sits down not only with the eyes, but also with the ear and the tact, because we listen to its murmurs and have the temptation of touching, to realize that the water is not real, but an art and imagination.

Almost a book would be necessary to describe the activities of this man, but finger in spite of a quoting, in addition to its linens, which is a teacher of the cartel, of the achievement of advertizing campaigns, of the creation of logotypes, processional banners, cloaks of the Virgins of its ground, personages’ portraits, like that of the proper king and of many others, acquaintances or strangers for the big public; calendars, fronts of books and magazines, although there always stays much superficially its own personality, which shows in that one so Andalusian facility to include a picture inside other, to the ingenious velazqueña.

He is like a Renaissance man penetrated to our epoch, with all the virtues of those geniuses of the Fine arts. For it and, especially by its way of seeing and of understanding the painting, it has been designated like member of the Malaga Academy of the Sciencies and the Humanities education of Saint Thomas.

Its way of thinking and of acting with the brushes it leads him to dominating the drawing and the colour, giving a big vivacity to its works, both in the portrait and in the scenery, so much in the intimate topics, as in that I included wide vision field, but leaving to us its impression of ripeness, which he inherited from the parents of the Malaga school of the XIXth, to whom it does not have anything that to envy.

Pedro J. Ortega