Unseen
Acrylic-based ink and spray paint on paper
Executed 27th September 2024, London.
With Unseen, Miguel Fernández extends the quiet radicalism of his visual language into one of his most psychologically charged portrayals of digital isolation. The work emerged from an encounter on a London street: a young boy, motionless amid the city’s movement, eyes locked on his phone, seemingly sealed within an invisible perimeter of light. Fernández carried this image back to the studio and transformed it into a meditation on disappearance in plain sight.
The composition presents the solitary figure of a boy standing against an undefined ground. His body, rendered in confident strokes of acrylic-based ink, has sculptural clarity; yet his presence feels spectral. The only colour, a vivid spray of paint that covers his eyes and glows from the phone in his hands, becomes both illumination and erasure. The matching tones unite device and blindness in a single act of symbolism: to see only through the screen is to cease seeing the world.
As in earlier works, the artist joined sheets of paper to form the support, deliberately leaving faint seams visible. This structural fragility is integral to the piece’s meaning. The boy’s identity, like the paper itself, is tenuously held together, patched, vulnerable, exposed to rupture. The material joins echo the precarious stitching of a psyche dependent on external validation, easily torn by the violence of what it consumes. Fernández has often spoken of the “thinness” that now separates exposure from harm; here, that thinness is literal.
Formally, Unseen achieves a remarkable balance between austerity and empathy. The figure’s stillness evokes both peace and peril; the absence of background grants him the gravity of an icon. The colour, minimal yet electric, charges the composition with tension, its beauty unsettling precisely because it seduces before it warns. The spray-painted band over the eyes, a recurring motif in Fernández’s lexicon, attains new resonance: less censorship than surrender, less concealment than absorption.
This work speaks about what it means to be here but not really present, to live in your body while your mind gets lost in the endless maze of the digital world. The boy isn’t blind because he doesn’t know; he’s blind because he’s seen too much. His mind is full of noise and images, and his sense of self has started to fade under it all. The artist wanted to show this quietly, without exaggeration, just the truth of how many young people live today: surrounded by light, but slowly disappearing inside it.
Significance
Unseen stands as a culmination of Fernández’s ongoing inquiry into childhood, technology, and the erosion of innocence in the digital era. It consolidates his command of contrast, material, conceptual, and emotional, and exemplifies his belief that simplicity can bear the weight of tragedy. Through its fragile surface and hypnotic economy of form, the work compels us to look harder at what has become invisible: the slow disappearance of presence in a world perpetually observed yet rarely seen.
