GC:4 is an invitation, a new iteration, a joyful infestation.
After three chapters of growth, chaos, and transformation, Dex Fernandez brings Garapata home. GC:4 goes back to how it all began — a return to the linear, unadorned walk at GC:1, the first of Fernandez’s Garanimation project.
It's a homecoming, and homecomings mean doors. Fernandez opens his own art space, where he is the one holding the key. In doing so, he opens a door to his past, walking Garapata back to the start, and at the same time opens new ones: for his art to keep evolving, and for the people who believed in him to walk through alongside him.
Garapata carries more than himself when he walks – he carries Fernandez’s story, and by now, the story of everyone who has supported it. With its many legs, Garapata is always on the move, always looking for the right place to land, feed, and settle. In that way, Garapata is a lot like us: complicated, restless, still searching for where we belong.
If the earlier chapters were about Garapata moving through the world — Tokyo's neon streets, Art Fair full of strangers' drawings, traversing alone in Cairo Biennale, Pinto Art Museum’s “mating season” exhibit that mirrored Fernandez's own unfolding life — GC:4 turns the lens around.
Here, the show is made of 335 small portraits: close friends who've been steady fixtures, longtime supporters, acquaintances who left a mark. Garapata doesn't just walk through these lives anymore. Garapata infests them — colorful threads, loose lines, and abstract marks spill across each face, obscuring but never erasing the person underneath.
These portraits are intimate. We don't see anyone in full — a partial gaze, a fragment of expression — but what comes through is warmth. Fernandez wanted the color and linework to evoke happiness. Rather than a clinical catalog of people, this is a celebration of them.
Behind them all, a large Garapata mural spans the exhibit wall, serving as the backdrop against which every portrait sits. Fernandez isn’t just documenting these people – he is bringing them into the whimsical universe of Garapata.
Across three prior chapters, people watched Fernandez grow. In this one, he turns around and shows us who grew with him. The people are the core of his art, and — as it turns out — the core of him as an artist too. This is Fernandez naming his tribe, and thanking them by opening the door wide enough for them to see themselves in it.
Coming full circle rarely means an ending. Fernandez is already the first to say the possibilities aren't finished. There could be another iteration. Another door. There usually is.
-Weng Cahiles
THE SIDEWALK
The Sidewalk is where Garapata gathers.
A sidewalk is neither here nor there. It is a space we pass through, a place where strangers cross paths, where things are left behind, where small lives quietly grow and coexist. It belongs to everyone and no one at the same time.
For GC4, The Sidewalk becomes Garapata’s imagined landscape—a living environment populated by strange creatures, familiar characters, wandering bodies, and fragments of a world that continues to expand. The figures move along its edges, crawl across its surfaces, and spill into one another, creating a kind of visual infestation. There is no clear beginning or end, only movement.
This is also where The Sidewalk connects to the 336 portraits in GC4. The portraits are people who have crossed paths with Fernandez—friends, supporters, acquaintances, and those who have become part of the journey. Like the creatures inhabiting this mural, they are not isolated figures. They exist within a larger network of relationships.
If Garapata is always searching for a host, The Sidewalk is the place where these encounters happen.
It is the space between destinations where we meet, attach, exchange, leave traces, and move on. A place where infestation can begin—not through force, but through proximity. One character meets another. One drawing leads to another. One person (or a character) becomes part of the story.
In this sense, The Sidewalk is not simply a backdrop for GC4. It is the ground where the infestation takes place.
A place to wander.
A place to gather.
A place to belong.
A place to leave something behind.
