Deep Down into the Ecstasy of False Modernism

Primo Marella Gallery is pleased to present “Deep down into the ecstasy of false modernism”, a solo exhibition by the talented emerging Filipino artist Jigger Cruz (1984, Manila).

The title of the exhibition reflects Jigger Cruz’s art practice and his idea to play with defacement and vandalization, making use of the oil colour, the spray paint and the rough interventions on the canvases, which he uses to burn and, in some cases, even to cut.

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 artwork was born from a painted canvas, where the artist copied the Flemish and Post-Renaissance masters. Apparently without a logical scheme, Cruz applies layer by layer the dense oil colour, not only hiding, rather mystifying the classical backdrop.

The endless tension towards limitlessness from one side and the proposal for a new figurative language from the other side leads the artist to exceed the formal frame-fixed boundaries, changing the frame itself from sheer decoration into work of art.

The vintage frames are burnt and treated as a continuum of the painting itself.

The aesthetics of his art practice recalls the influences of artists as Bram Boggart, Willem de Kooning and the avant-garde spirit of Francis Picabia.

Cruz’s layers of pastos oil and spray paint guide the viewer to a sensorial experience which brings us closer to the sublime, where the smell of oil paints still lingers in the air.

Jigger Cruz was born in 1984 in Manila, Philippines. He studied Fine Arts at the Far Eastern University in the Philippines and Design at De La Salle-College of St. Benilde.