Veronica Fernandez’s Debut at Anat Ebgi, “Prey,” Shrinks the Canvas to Amplify Claustrophobia and Care
In Veronica Fernandez’s paintings, the room is never just a room. It is a pressure system — a place where bodies huddle, adapt, and try to make something livable out of what they’ve been given. That psychological weather is at the center of “Prey,” the artist’s debut solo exhibition at Anat Ebgi, where she has made a decisive turn toward small-scale canvases, punctuated by a single large, anchoring work.
The shift is not merely stylistic. Fernandez, who is based in La Habra, California, began leaning into smaller formats after relocating from a large Downtown Los Angeles studio to a townhouse. The upheaval of moving, paired with a more limited workspace, pushed her toward a tighter scale — a practical constraint that mirrors the constricted interiors and uneasy thresholds that recur throughout the show.
“Prey” takes its title from a poem Fernandez wrote, “I Wanna Fly,” and the exhibition’s emotional logic follows that impulse: the desire to escape, even when escape is not available. In a video call, Fernandez described a “push and pull” in the work between discomfort and tenderness — the way a space can feel hostile, and the way people still find warmth inside it. She also spoke of an urgency in the figures, as if closing their eyes might make the walls compress.
Those sensations are rooted in lived experience. Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Fernandez was raised by a single father alongside her older sister and younger brother. During childhood, the family experienced periods of homelessness, staying in shelters, motels, and transitional housing in neighborhoods she has described as “weren’t great.” The paintings do not attempt to recreate those places with documentary fidelity. Instead, they translate memory into mood: resiliency and community alongside vulnerability, vigilance, and the stress of survival.
Fernandez’s process begins with the real. Old family photographs serve as a point of departure, but the people who populate her scenes are composites — part recollection, part invention. Her siblings frequently appear as the underlying “models,” a fact she treats with humor. “I always joke with them, ‘you guys are like my muses — you’re in all my works!’” she said.
Even when a figure originates in a specific photograph, Fernandez resists portraiture’s identifying clarity. She borrows a pose, a fragment of anatomy, or a gesture, then obscures the face through shadowing, distortion, and partial abstraction. In “Next to Shower Here” (2026), for instance, a cousin provided the initial reference, but Fernandez repainted the features to keep the figure anonymous, allowing the image to hold personal history without becoming a literal depiction of a family member.
That balance between specificity and generality is one of the show’s quiet achievements. By withholding fixed identities — including her own, in a childlike self-portrait that is intentionally difficult to locate — Fernandez opens the scenes to viewers without flattening their origins. As she put it, the work moves from the personal toward the broader through paint: by abstracting areas, introducing movement, and letting memory blur at the edges.
Several paintings named in the exhibition underscore how the everyday becomes charged in her hands: “Some Things Don’t Stay for Tomorrow” (2026), “Highway Laundry” (2026), and “Next to Shower Here” (2026). The settings often carry traces of the American roadside and its provisional architectures. Real-world signage — Vagabond Inn, Denny’s, Mobil — appears not as a travelogue detail but as a kind of shared vernacular, tethering the images to a recognizable America while keeping the locations deliberately generalized.
In “Prey,” the reduced scale intensifies that effect. The smaller canvases pull the viewer closer, asking for an intimate kind of looking — the opposite of spectacle. What emerges is a portrait of survival that refuses melodrama: spaces that can feel threatening, and the tenderness that persists anyway, as people learn, again and again, how to live inside the squeeze.
