Phantasmagoria was a spectacle created at the end of the 18th century in Paris by the painter, draftsman, and professor of physics specialized in optics, Étienne-Gaspard Robert. It was him who shaped our prevalent perception of ghosts as ethereal and semi-transparent beings.

This spectacle began through sensory deception. It was all part of an intricate process in which lights, shadows, mirrors, artificial smoke and magic lanterns were combined to conjure up this fantasy, creating an unprecedented optical effect at the time.

The show required a terrifying setting, but the purpose was not to create a gruesome story about the existence of the specters, but quite the opposite: the phantasmagoria helped to give a logical explanation to the fears and superstitions through mirages and optical illusions.

Fernando Loyola's painting unfolds as a sequence of irrepressible impulses: to cover, to reveal, to re-cover with thin layers of acrylic, to conceal entirely, and to begin again—repeating an almost identical cycle without ever retracing steps. The layers beneath persist as the foundational structure of the work. His constructive logic navigates a delicate equilibrium, balancing method, chance, and improvisation.

This element of arbitrariness in the resolution stems from a sudden unleashing of forces. Each brushstroke is marked by the vertiginous progression, abandon, and urgency of hundreds of strokes that follow every decisive act within the painting. It is a constant metamorphosis of the material, driven by the fiction of error: inventing it in order to correct it, as a pretext for arriving at the conclusion of each work. This compulsion to declare a painting finished, immediately followed by the impulse to begin another, forms the core mechanism of Loyola’s artistic universe—a frenzied and urgent rhythm that propels his creative process.

Much like the Phantasmagoria spectacles of the 18th century, Fernando Loyola’s paintings strike as a singular force. Objects—indeterminate and ambiguous—crowd together in a densely packed pictorial space. Viewing them, we are immediately seized by the power of their transparencies, their shadowed depths, and the small apertures of light. The living presence in the work emerges above and beyond the forms themselves. Nothing in these paintings is passive or inert. The image organizes itself into a network, or a narrative plot, evoking the peculiar interconnectedness of things in abstract scenes where Loyola has found a way to narrate his ghosts.

Text by: Valeria Maggi