Glitch Habitation

Primae Noctis Art Gallery is pleased to present “Glitch Habitation”, the first european solo exhibition of Pilipino artist Jigger Cruz (1984, Malabon City - Philippines).

The artworks made for this exhibition explore the concept of failure in the visual dialogue between utter surface and inner content, between past and present, between figuration and abstraction. Each single painting depicts and puts in contrast all these elements. What Jigger Cruz means to stage is a continuous sensorial slippage across the field of artistic perception, bringing it to metaphorically fluctuate from optical to tactile and from tactile back to optical again. The spectator, before such canvases, loses the strictness of sight and submits to a multi-faceted sensorial stimulation.

The artist reveals that most of his efforts have their rise from a keynote plan about dismantling the heterogeneous portrayal layers, aiming to their reconstruction, with an attempt to track and, simultaneously, to extend over time the American-born abstract expressionism. Dwindling aesthetic differences between background and foreground, dominated by the oppressing matter of colours, Cruz tries to lay the foundations for a new habitat for a new abstraction subject. The endless tension towards limitlessness from one side and the proposal for a new figurative language from the other side lead the artist to exceed the formal frame-fixed boundaries, changing the frame itself from sheer decoration into work of art.

Each artwork setting is a re-make of recognizable XVII century flemish paintings. Characters painted in the background and frames, recalling ancient times, are the concrete tools by whom Jigger Cruz gets possession of art history and the past, turning them into the active field for his instinctual and impulsive gesture, where the foreground colour hides and reveals the pictorial area beneath.

In these presented artworks, the various pictorial layers involved in such dialogue/conflict generate sudden thick and dense coloured flows, which deconstruct the ancient, scattering its visual value, spuring the spectator to a personal, intimate and synesthetic reconstruction.

“Glitch habitation” is the story of a compromise. It is the title of an iconographical series which refers to the background-relegated scenes impossibility to “inhabit” the conventional art space, advising for a beyond grounded on the artist’s technical expertise. Cruz’ skill to right tame the colour springs up our multisensory perceptions, enabling us to enjoy the artwork in its physical entirety. Space overtaking and time blasting flow together in unreal landscapes, dramatic and violent in their meaningful concreteness, cryptic and puzzling in their deaf abstraction. Thus, across Cruz’s production, all the creative process steady balances, like a tightrope walker, between formal design and action painting naturalness, where it is just the author he who right decides when and where to let one aptitude prevail on the other. Such awareness – the wise mastery on inspiration – stems improvisation risks, incidental to dripping technique, and rewards Jigger Cruz and his art-making as a genuine unicum on the contemporary panorama.