culture

Artwork by Tino

Sheriff of the West: Tino Fernández
article and photos by Peter Szok

Stanley Heckadon Moreno noted in a 1984 article that the painters who embellish Panama City’s famous buses find themselves situated within a clear hierarchy and “invisible demarcations” dividing the metropolitan area. The best of them are associated with well-defined territories, where they design the majority of the red devils and where their customers and the broader community admire their skills and look upon them as “idols.” 

Small businessmen dominate Panama’s transportation sector, and they hire the artists to help win over passengers in the fierce races around the capital and its adjacent suburban districts. The paintings act as a form of advertisement, but they also become the topic of conversations and serve as reference points for artistic appreciation, rather than museums or private galleries. Traditionally, the vehicles’ hyper-masculine qualities, their loud colors, designs, mufflers, and assertive pregones have most attracted the attention of younger men, and some of them naturally seek out the masters and train under their supervision to learn the practice. 

Bus art in Panama is not an amateur activity, but rather it is a serious and long-term profession in which the leading figures labor for years to perfect their talents and take over the routes, where they tend to monopolize the business. Currently, Óscar Melgar (1968-) controls much of the capital; however, it is Tino Fernández (1961-) who has emerged in La Chorrera and who now dominates what is known as Panama West, the zone stretching out from the interoceanic waterway and reaching roughly to the town of Capira.

Tino Fernández

Tino’s ascendance began in the early 1990s, when his mentor Ramón Enrique Hormi (Monchi, 1947-) took a job with the Maritime Authority and devoted less time to working on the buses. Monchi himself had once apprenticed under the legendary José de Jesus Villarué (1926-). Villarué, who is more commonly known as “Yoyo,” had been decorating vehicles in Panama City since the early 1940s, and it was he who had transferred this practice to La Chorrera with an eye-catching piece in 1960. The bus was called the “Gentleman of Paris,” and it featured a scene of the Eiffel Tower and a gleaming interpretation of the town’s water falls. Yoyo’s specialty has always been water, and he reproduced the cascade with alluring colors, immediately seizing the interest of other bus owners and convincing them to seek out his services. Soon Yoyo’s representations of the Bridge of the Americas, his oceanscapes, and depictions of Panama’s beaches became a common sight in the local terminal and eventually throughout the surrounding region. 

Yoyo

Tino and other painters have followed these paths. They are not self-taught “primitivists,” as some have suggested, but instead, they benefit from a body of collective knowledge and a long string of tutelages tying them to the past. In addition, many of them have taken formal classes. Tino is a graduate of the National School of Fine Arts, while his rival Óscar Melgar studied at Ganexa, the capital’s private art academy.

As a student, Tino confronted a host of prejudices. His professors and colleagues often suggested that bus paintings lacked aesthetic merit. They were garish and imbalanced, according to these critics, and the decorators relied too heavily on images taken from magazines, from album covers, and the movies. Tino reacted in a pragmatic manner. He accepted the useful lessons of his mentors, but he rejected their disapproval and their narrow conceptions about what constituted artistic expression. Tino’s father had driven buses and had occasionally painted them in the 1950s. He had frequently taken his son around the city, introducing him to many important artists and showing him how they utilize popular culture. To beguile and capture potential customers, they “cannibalize” aspects of the mass media by imaginatively framing actors, singers, and other celebrities in spectacular designs and zigzag patterns. The goal is not to “copy” or produce an exact duplication, but rather to exploit the prestige of an iconographic symbol and to frame it in an ingenious and compelling manner. Few people could resist the “Gentleman of Paris,” just as it is difficult to ignore Tino’s portrait of Jesus Christ, splashed across the hood of a more recent red devil.

Justino Fernández, Padre

While still at the National School of Fine Arts, Tino was also working under Monchi, and was beginning to understand his luminous landscapes, which were equally capable of amazing viewers and drawing them through the vehicles’ entrances. Monchi specializes in panoramas of the Interior, but he also portrays alpine villages, whose mountains and crystal streams grab one’s attention and supposedly help to cool down passengers. Today Tino’s production reflects many of these lessons, as well as his more academic preparation. He is an accomplished student of light, composition, and perspective, and he uses these skills to produce the buses whose bright portraits and scenes have long fascinated Panamanians and which constitute a legitimate tradition of painting. This tradition is connected to the country’s academic circles. However, it draws its true strength from its own history and standards which Tino has mastered over the last decades to become one of the discipline’s principal figures. Tino arose from the inheritances of his predecessors and now extends their legacies as the reigning Sheriff of the West.