Having lived through the Spanish and Cuban political crises since childhood, Jesse A. Fernández, a profound humanist, has been able to penetrate the most intimate and singular aspects of his subjects. With no particular technique, rejecting all studio rules and never resorting to posing, photography was like drawing for him.

He planned to write a book about painters… in which each painter would add his autograph like an intimate calligraphy. But death, in the form of a heart attack, preceded him into the darkroom.

It is part of this unfinished project that the Orbis pictus gallery will be unveiling with the first of these intimate calligraphies (Cárdenas, Cuevas, Lam, Miró, Saura, Tàpies…) under portraits taken on the spot thanks to the complicit relationship between the artist and the painter-photographer. And to complement and enrich Jesse A. Fernández’s project that the gallery is reconstituting his artistic universe by offering works by many of the great artists he worked with on the side.