Adam Cruces at Giorgio Galotti

Artist: Adam Cruces

Exhibition title: Rustic Murmur

Venue: Giorgio Galotti, Turin, Italy

Date: June 7 – September 15, 2018

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Giorgio Galotti, Turin

For the occasion of Adam Cruces’ first solo show at Giorgio Galotti, he will be creating an installation that expands from the main gallery space to its roof terrace. This new body of works has been produced during a one month residency at Cripta747. Therefore ‘Rustic Murmur’ combines interests and elements of his previous work with influences of his time in Turin.

Adam Cruces (1985, Houston, Texas, USA) lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. His work has been exhibited in solo shows (selection): – 2017 – ‘Youth is drunkenness without wine’ with Louisa Gagliardi, Bikini, Basel (CH); DAMA with Giorgio Galotti, Turin (IT); ‘Fondante’ Museo della Frutta, Turin (IT); ‘Gravity’s Accent’, Obst, Chicago, IL (US); ‘Tastes like headaches’ with Louisa Gagliardi, kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (LV); – 2016 – ‘Walking Errands’ with Louisa Gagliardi, The Cabin, Los Angeles, CA (US); ‘Tell’ OLM Space, Neuchâtel (CH); ‘Pastel’ Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris (FR); ‘What A Silencer Sounds Like’ with Sinae Yoo, Kunsthaus Langethal, Langenthal (CH); – 2015 – ‘Diet Sonata’ Smart Objects, Los Angeles, CA (US); ‘Sift’ Levy Delval, Brussels (BE); ‘Fixing to’ Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris (FR); – 2014 – ‘Un Coucher de Soleil’ Exo Exo, Paris (FR); ’29’ Plymouth Rock, Zürich (CH); Black Hole, Phonebox, IMO, Copenhagen (DK); – 2013 – ‘Point White Range’ No Floor at NERO Headquarters, Rome (IT); ‘Nothing To See Here’ with Enrico Boccioletti, Swiss Institute, Milan (IT). And group shows (selection): – 2017 – ‘Werk und Atelierstipendien Ausstellung’, Helmhaus, Zürich (CH); ‘Collectorz’ Smallville, Neuchâtel (CH); ‘A Matter of Fact’ Vermilion Sands, Copenhagen (DK); – 2016 – ‘The Conference’ Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus (DK); ‘Stoneroses #5’, Riverside Space, Bern (CH); ‘Exercises in Style’, Suprainfinit, Bucharest (RO); ‘For Granted’ Hole Of The Fox, Antwerp (BE); ‘Dear Betty: Run Fast’ Bite Hard!, GAMEC, Bergamo (IT); ‘Over and Under’ monCHERI, Brussels (BE); – 2015 – ‘Swimminal Poolitics’ Samos (GR); ‘How my mom got hacked’ Dash, Kortrijk (BE); ‘Plowing Solids’ Yves Klein Archives, Paris (FR); ‘Unhide’ Smart Objects, Los Angeles, CA (US); ‘Hairy Plotter and the Polygrapher’s Tones’ TOVES, Copenhagen (DK); ‘Fit For Purpose’ Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus (CH).

What is this eternity?

The front of a large shop had been entirely removed, and the entrance is decorated with stripy curtains, awash with orange and cream in the sunset. Another regiment of abstraction. The image melts into a vision of sun-dappled woods. It melts until all that is left is a cloud of electronic pigment moving nebulously through a spangled field of Seurat-like pointillist fragments.

It is still the first night, and the first day,/ the world is born when two people kiss,/ a drop of light from transparent juices,/ the room cracks half-open like a fruit

To create light instead of objects: it is all about formal innovation, vision and social realism. The subjects of this production regime are individuals, the amateurs with their smartphones striving to capture bits of life, greatly extending the sphere of commodity exchange by flooding the market with countless images of figures, landscapes, and events. The global citizens who can afford to spend Sundays in the parks, buy paintings and distinguish themselves as net-worthy citizens with passport power.

Coextensively, the production of artworks is part of architecture, theatre and image development. Its ultimate Desire is to assimilate to what is alive, swallowing reality whole and spitting it up again as art. It reveals the immateriality of people and landscapes, peeling away the layers of their physicality. The colours mark an appropriate intervention against the total despair towards society’s own grey signa.

But eventually, this regime will perish because of the negative and exclusive solution to the question of shading. Shadows are considered always a consequence, the results from the leaps in productive efficiency. Their unavoidable leisure is deemed to cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. (On what could it be based, if not on a certain assimilation accepted as taking place between labour as productive activity and labour as a commodity that can be bought and sold?)

While time under capitalism finds bodies in order to cast its magic lantern upon them, these incarnations will take on the phantasmatic dimension of emblematically reclined beings, slipping from the factual to the metaphorical with disarming fluency. Hollywood film-makers will spend millions of dollars to increase the realism of their strange curves, so delicate, so adamantine, strong as a mountain, graceful as a bow just bent. Nevertheless, it is improbable that these figures will care about it. In fact, their suggestive economy will reduce all politics to the on/off logic of appearance and disappearance, light and shadow, as that endless passage which is called time. In this solidarity, it can be seen the image of secrecy—the hour as a crystal ball.

Consider the blankness/ of the screen glowing, it is/ perhaps within this space of electric transference/ that one today rediscovers mystery? / Being outside both the comfort and time zones, strangers to / all making landscapes and events recessive / behind harmless facades

This spiritual realm is evoked through the operation of echo diffraction and shadow: the writing not of signs, but of murmurs. Dawn advances, which means: develop a new chronopolitics as in spectres-kissing. Develop another kind of temporal politics that amplifies the sense that the question is no longer, “Are you going to disappear soon?”, but the aesthetics of disappearance, of being on escape.

-Bianca Stoppani et al.