Zielinsky is pleased to present “Glitched Space”, the first solo show by Guillermo Garcia Cruz in our space in Barcelona within the framework of the Art Nou program. The exhibition brings together the artist’s recent production that has been developed in two moments - in his first stay in Barcelona during the second half of 2021 and in the months prior to the exhibition, in which Garcia Cruz used the Piramidón residence to develop his project.
The exhibition presents a series of paintings and sculptures that play with the formal legacy left by Latin American concretism, either through Lygia Clark and her paintings from the “Planos em Superfície Modulada” series, as well as through the production of the movement Uruguayan-Argentine MADI from the 1940s. According to the movement’s group of artists, painting should not be conditioned by the rectangular canvas, on the contrary, the shape of the canvas should follow the structure of the painting. These references place us historically so that, from there, we can determine the similarities and differences that García Cruz proposes in his projects. If, on the one hand, we have a formal rapprochement between García Cruz and the constructivist heritage, on the other hand, we have an attempted rupture that occurs in the very structure of the work. This collapse that occurs within the object is most evident in this exhibition - the paintings and sculptures are always on the verge of separating, multiplying elsewhere, seeking a life of their own by fragmenting their body-structure into contextual space. Historically, we can relate this act of rupture with a reflection on the project of modernity and its collapse in Latin American contexts, as well as on our current moment of global changes where we feel disoriented and anxious about what is about to happen.
García Cruz considers this production as an attempt to disorient the viewer’s perception in relation to the plane of the work and produce an effect of noise, like a temporary error or a “glitch”, an appropriate term used by the artist in the computer context and a reference to the title of the current exhibition. Repetition, movement, transformation, the limits between interior and exterior are some of the visible concerns in the artist’s production, in addition to the pictorial work itself, which may contain apparently opposite elements on its surface such as brightness and opacity, texture and flatness and that, in this exhibition, they are not antagonistic, but rather share the same terrain and interest.
Guillermo García Cruz (1988, Montevideo, Uruguay). Professor ENG of Visual Arts at the IPA, Montevideo, Uruguay. He has been part of the Washington Studio School and Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Washington, USA. Recently, his work is part of the collections: CIFO – Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, USA; PAMM – Pérez Art Museum Miami, USA; Collection of Chicago Northwestern University, USA.
