Commentary
Any art can be described, allowing us to approximate the effect of form, color and image upon the viewer. But to some degree each attempt to get close to a work shows where words fall short of vision. The art of Niles Cruz is a lesson in the power of visual experience as a special kind of knowing, beyond the reach of language.
Cruz creates mixed media works that begin with dense, gestural drawings on 8½" x 11" paper, which are scanned and then printed on clear acetate. This transparency is usually painted from behind and then recopied multiple times. These transparencies are massed in gridded fields, disrupted by rectangles from other drawings.
This basic description seems paltry when compared to the extravagant results. The work, typically 33" x 43 ½”, are scintillating expanses of lines whose free-form curves, scratches, or controlled linear designs, take on an unanticipated inner logic. Drawings are made to meet or mirror each other, creating a myriad of new forms and patterns. The fields of lines range from delicate traceries to almost expressionist torrents of strokes. The grids of drawing shift subtly with variations in the printing process or change radically with the introduction of new background colors. Cruz creates lyrical works through the play of graphic energy multiplied and sublimated, expanded and interrupted. There are passages of psychedelic intensity and disjunctions that shake the viewer from the interiority of mandala-like designs. While abstract, each work has its own distinctive emotional weather.
Dark Wings Flutter is a compacted realm of tight loops that seems to emanate from a kind of rose window into a psychically dark, shifting magnetic field. It is this sense of chaos organized that animates Growing Bones, whose fine lines resembling Arabic calligraphy conjure the appearance of phantom faces and bodies. This corporeal sense becomes visceral in the pulsing Blood Pushes the Heart. Glowing like a stain glass window, Living on Jackson, emits a kind of joyful radiance. Other pieces, like All Lives to Die, with its puddles of blue, are nature refracted through a playful reserve. Then there are works like Only One Force Drives that seem to collapse the ancient and the contemporary into a vision of a new emergent cultural form.
Cruz’s art is allusive, hinting at rather than describing states of feeling in constant movement. He is showing us how to be actively present and yet know that everything from the personal to the macroscopic is subject to imminent transformation.
John Mendelsohn, New York City
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