WALTER CRUZ

The Secrets To The Stars Are Buried In Our Blood

April 8th - March 6th 2023

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present The Secrets To The Stars Are Buried In Our Blood, the rst solo exhibition by Walter Cruz. The exhibition brings together a multidimensional suite of the artist’s media-laden paintings and sculptures, a scene through which his distinctive set of materials, imagery, and techniques swiftly merge. Cruz’s contemporary tablets are as skillful as they are sentimental, fusing text, collage, and found matter against textured brushwork to transform mere objects into living entities.. His careful compositions appear seamless, stirring up the impression that Cruz doesn’t just make these works, but rather wills them into existence. In this new series, the artist’s meditative practice generates narratives that are at once private and collective, in tune with a human experience forever in ux between inner and outer atmospheres.

Cruz’s latest large-scale landscapes summon the texture ofJapanese Sekitei gardens, employing a dense mixture of acrylic with pumice stone in the patterns of waves or rippling water. A rich and luminous palette calls forth yohaku-no-bi, meaning “the beauty of blank space.” The time-honored concept emerges new and radical in the eyes of a second generation Washington Heights-born Dominican New Yorker, staring into the void from a window half open.

The works mimic this intimate vision in thin, long structures— inset in the middle, they usher in Cruz’s emotional impressions of the outside world. In his largest work to date, “May You Never Be Alone During The Good”, the enormous black and blue expanse evokes the exhibition's title: just o center, a tiny pin of a yellow crown surfaces as the canvas descends vertically into murky dark, reading as a solitary and guiding star.

These entangled works arrive full of weighty connotations, exposing rope as a material that has been used to both build and wreck human civilization. . Cruz makes use of this controversial apparatus in the context of utility and support, positing it in opposition to its binding structure. . His complex knotting techniques undermine rope as a reminder of restriction, instead reinforcing the foundation of his work’s primary conversation: whatwearelearning,unlearning,bornwith,andacquiringovertime,allthewhileallowingspace forcontradiction,putting“and''inplaceof“or.” Cruzworksinthatmediumofboundlessness,fashioning modern markers of slang and clothing as hieroglyphs with ancient intuition. In bringing a historic gravity to contemporary motifs, his works nd ample space in which past, present, and future may coalesce.