JIGGER CRUZ

　　Solo exhibition at ARNDT Berlin

　　Duration: June 4 - August 29, 2015

　　Opening Ceremony: Wednesday, June 3, 2015 from 6 – 9pm at ARNDT Berlin

　　Address: ARNDT Berlin, Potsdamer Strasse 96, 10785 Berlin

　　Contact: info@arndtberlin.com

　　ARNDT Berlin is pleased to present its first solo exhibition by Jigger Cruz.

　　There is a method to the proverbial madness behind the works of Jigger Cruz: a sense of continuum guiding his process of defacing and repainting art objects to produce new strategies of representation. Part of a generation of young Filipino artists exposed to an increasingly globalized market over the past five years, Cruz has been exploring the possibilities of painting as a reflexive and transnational marker of contemporaneity.

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　　Cruz’s own story as a young Filipino painter is still an unfolding one. He studied Fine Arts at the Far Eastern University in Manila until 2007 and mounted his first solo exhibition the year after, in 2008. In 2012, he presented his first solo exhibition abroad. In this relatively short span of time, the artist has gradually steered his art practice and philosophy towards reflecting on how the cultural industry—both at the local and global levels—has, in his own words, “developed an insatiable illusionism,” and also exploring the nature of painting as part of the material language of art.

　　Twist and Misstate

　　The artist embarks on a sweep of iconoclasm against classical painting and sculpture in the way he obscures objects beneath fresh and thick layers of pigment. In recent years, he has produced objects—ranging from paintings and sculptures to installations—and has collectively positioned them as discrete and decaying icons of academism and tradition. Contained within ornate frames or set up on pedestals, all the works are drawn over and defaced: most traces of carefully applied paint and modeling are obscured by raw, textured brushstrokes.

　　Neutral Yesterday Series

　　The artist describes his works as “highly entropic acts of personal spontaneity, that explores different approaches to painting.” Cruz excises and exorcises all earlier traces of representation and subject matter, using vivid colors applied straight from the tube. Paint brushes are wielded like crayons or pens, cutting patterns across previously “sacred” surfaces with an intense, almost primal, vitality. Viscous pigment is squeezed and smeared, directed and deliberately drawn across canvas and frame, form and surface. Despite the seeming dominance of anarchy and chaos across their surfaces, Cruz’s works may be also, conversely, read as a conscious strategy to visualize the transitional nature of contemporary art. A strong sense of containment prevails: the will to play with the very physicality of painting—and to adhere to these formal parameters across a wide range of objects—makes his process a highly intentional and deliberate one.

　　Neutral Yesterday Series

　　Cruz applies this same method of defacement, uniformly and deliberately, across different objects. Thus his works can be encountered as a continuum of gestures, rather than as a collection of discrete and immobile objects. All forms are subsumed to Cruz’s playful process of strategic destabilization. What would be otherwise seen as individual works of art are collectively and physically altered: all part of the sweeping, irreversible process of transformation. Through his work, Cruz reveals his veering away from the strategies outlined by modernism. Instead of aiming for the creation of a new, unparalleled and original sensibility, the artist responds by consciously appropriating, destroying, and defacing elements of the old tradition both as an artistic strategy and an end in itself. Cruz’s embrace of the postmodern ethos and his professed pursuit of iconoclasm are most clearly seen in his approach towards painting and sculpture, as demonstrated in his recent oil-on-canvas paintings and sculptural pieces produced between 2012 and 2015. This series is altered through his process of incising and excising, defacing and repainting, concealment and resurrection.

　　Neutral Yesterday Series

　　Cruz personally produces the paintings that he paints over afterwards, calling them “backgrounds” instead of finished works. This linguistic quirk is telling, revealing how the artist imagines the act of painting an object and creating a new artwork as formal, fundamental gestures united by the emergence of new experiences and ways of seeing. Portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes are all painted over, inhabited, and overwritten by the presence of pigment. Thus the creation of representation and subject matter are not the end goals of art, but merely constitute one facet of artistic production and experience.

　　The process of alteration is vital to the concept of painting as a physical object, removed from history and iconography. Cruz chooses random images from existing paintings and treats them as physical surfaces rather than subject matter. A play between depth and surface, two- and three-dimensionality ensues as Cruz alters his backgrounds by applying paint—squeezed and drawn across, dipped and dripping, or seemingly randomly covered—across their surface images. Cruz’s use of discarded, damaged, frames for the works is, likewise, a conscious reference to the weight of tradition.

　　Neutral Yesterday Series

　　Cruz’s emphasis on defacement as an artistic process connotes parallels with the reclaiming and rewriting of history, identity, and the present—concepts that the practice of representation has made possible and visible in the past. Gestural abstraction is employed as a means of erasure and effacement, critique and construction. In attempting to visually and experientially reconcile the condition of contemporaneity with a distant, often conflicting, past, Cruz’s works can be read as signifiers of the protracted interregnum: giving form to the complex state of flux that characterizes the production of contemporary art. Ultimately, the lens of history may very well be the best means by which Cruz’s work can be weighed. The artist’s strategy of exposing the embedded nature of painting within canonized traditions emphasizes its capacity for being wielded reflexively. In doing so, he affirms the very potency and viability of painting as a form of artistic production, all the way from the distant past and, possibly, into the future that lies ahead.

　　Neutral Yesterday Series

　　ARNDT is pleased to announce a new publication surveying the practice of Jigger Cruz on the occasion of Cruz’s first solo exhibition at ARNDT Berlin. Published by DISTANZ Verlag, the 100 page hard-copy colour publication includes essays by Lisa Ito and Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay.

　　*The above text is an excerpt from Lisa Ito's essay "Caught in the Interregnum" published in the DISTANZ Verlag Jigger Cruz 2015 publication

　　Neutral Yesterday Series

　　Neutral Yesterday Series

　　Neutral Yesterday Series

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