Francisco-Fernando Granados, who claims abstraction? study 1, 2023, digital print on paper. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the Artist, 2023. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography
Francisco-Fernando Granados, who claims abstraction? study 2, 2023, digital print on paper. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the Artist, 2023. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography
Francisco-Fernando Granados, apostrophe (portrait), 2012-2013, correction fluid on postcard. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the Artist, 2023. Photo: Rachel Topham Photography
Francisco-Fernando Granados’ gestural practice interrogates the legacies of Modernist abstraction. who claims abstraction? study 1 and study 2 were part of the artist’s preparations for his 2023 solo exhibition at Teck Gallery on SFU’s Vancouver’s Harbour Centre campus. Incorporating daily drawing into his performance and media art background, Granados generated immersive digital print installations that both drew upon and critiqued Modernist visual strategies. Employing what he calls “minor abstraction,” Granados emphasizes ephemeral materials, site-specific approaches, and non-art contexts, to infuse geometric visual vocabularies with an open-ended politics. apostrophe (portrait) meditates on national belonging and the abstraction of bodies within ideologically driven geo-political conflicts. A “rectified ready-made,” the postcard work connects Granados—himself a Guatemalan refugee claimant who became a Canadian citizen—to a young Egyptian-Canadian man his age imprisoned as an enemy combatant in Guantanamo. The work has particular resonance for the SFU Art Collection because the artist received the original postcard at a talk at Harbour Centre by the imprisoned man’s legal counsel. The postcards were distributed at the close of the event as an invitation to attendees to send to the Prime Minister to plea for the man’s release. Through his donation to the SFU Art Collection, which itself contains many iconic Modernist works, Granados aims to ask the question “who claims abstraction?,” to complicate Modernist narratives and encourage new research possibilities.
Born in Guatemala and based in Toronto, Francisco-Fernando Granados holds a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto (2012) and is currently pursuing a PhD in Media & Design Innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University. He has taught art and theory at OCAD University and University of Toronto Scarborough. Granados’ practice has traced his movement from convention refugee to critical citizen, using abstraction performatively, site-specifically, and relationally, to create projects that challenge the stability of practices of recognition. His work has developed from the intersection of formal painterly training at Langara College, working in performance through artist-run spaces, studies in queer and feminist theory at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and early activism as a peer support worker with immigrant and refugee communities. This layering of experiences has trained his intuitions to seek site-responsive approaches, alternative forms of distribution, and the weaving of lyrical and critical propositions.
Granados’ writing appears in various publications, including Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, and FUSE. Awards include grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, Toronto and Ontario Art Councils, and the Governor’s General’s Silver Medal. Recent exhibition projects include who claims abstraction? (2023-2024) at SFU Galleries’ Teck Gallery, who claims abstraction?: Selections from the SFU Art Collection (2023) at SFU Gallery Burnaby and SFU Belzberg Library; foreward (2021-23), at The MacLaren Art Centre, refugee reconnaissance (2021) at AXENE07 in Gatineau, and duet (2019-20) a traveling two-person exhibition alongside Canadian modernist painter Jack Bush. Notable exhibitions involve collaboration with galleries in Peterborough, Montreal, St. John, Toronto and participation in international group shows on contemporary queer aesthetics.
Granados currently lives and works in Toronto.