Divine Synthetics

Press release

Primo Marella Gallery Lugano is pleased to present “Jigger Cruz - Divine Synthetics” the new exhibition dedicated to the Filipino artist JIGGER CRUZ.

Born in 1984, Manila, Philippines, he lives and works in Manila.

Jigger’s art practice is characterized by his idea to play with defacement and vandalization, making use of the oil color, the spray paint and the rough interventions on the canvases, which he uses to burn and, in some cases, even to cut.

Each artwork springs from a painted canvas, where Cruz copies the Flemish and Post-Renaissance masters. The gures of the classical paintings that transpire below, remind the viewer of the painstaking pictorial activity and the artistic historical baggage of the contemporary painter.

Apparently without a logical scheme, the artist applies the dense oil colour layer by layer. Not hiding, rather mystifying the classical backdrop.

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 guration and abstraction.

The endless tension towards limitlessness from one side and the proposal for a new gurative 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 in uences 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 is a young Philippine artist already listed in the international auction houses in the world.
He studied Fine Arts at the Far Eastern University in the Philippines and design at De La Salle-College of St. Benilde.

Installation Views