Javier Cruz
Espejismos (Mirage)
25 May–22 June 2011
Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm
Alvaro Obregón 99
Colonia Roma
México D.F., C.P. 06700
T +52 (55) 5525-1332
F +52 (55) 5525-5141
IN THE EXHIBITION ESPEJOS, JAVIER CRUZ TACKLES FACTS AND FANTASIES AS
THE MAIN SUBJECTS
To talk about mirrors is to talk about reality and fantasy, faces and masks, science and religion, magic and dreams. The history of mirrors is the history of light, and light is color, shape and texture. That’s exactly what Javier Cruz represents in his recent solo exhibition Espejismos (Mirage).
The mirror, says Javier Cruz, has been through time a field that leads to literature, poetry, painting, religion, the universe and the supernatural, “The idea that the human mind is like a mirror reflecting reality has been evolving through time. For the ancient Greeks—but also for modern thinkers, like Max Scheler and others—the mirror was a symbol of imagination and awareness by its capacity of reproducing the echoes of the visible world.”
About this subject, the art critic Germaine Gómez Haro, pointed that “After reading Philipp Vandenberg’s Der Spiegelmacher (The Inventor of Mirrors), Javier Cruz starts from that analogy to develop Mirages, his most recent series of paintings, considering that if there’s something that substantially alters our perception of things, it is the mirror. In modifying anything that comes before them, mirrors also change our special sensations. That is perhaps what Diego Velázquez successfully aimed to achieve in Las Meninas: the idea of an awareness of representation.”
Through the multiplicity of images that spring from mirrors, Javier Cruz has apprehended the universe of figures and characters that have joined him during his years as a painter. According to Javier, we find the whole essence of the self within mirrors. They are also a means of confronting and getting to know oneself, and he shapes that cognitive experience in powerful canvases laden with symbols, dreams and desires.
Beyond showing an illusory reproduction of figures, mirrors reveal the essences and evanescence that subtly shift between the realm of appearance and objective truth. Like the mirror, painting and literature are the great lies that open our eyes and allow us to grasp with our sight a different reality, in an effort to find ourselves again and to discover ourselves by the reciprocal actions of seeing and being seen. In that bottomless mirror we call art, the creator searches for an answer to the eternal question that people have asked for centuries: Who am I?
Espejismos is Javier Cruz’s eighth exhibition in Galeria Casa Lamm. Throughout 18 years, Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm has shaped itself as a living space, plural and inclusive, devoted to teaching and spreading the arts. Since 1994, Galería Casa Lamm has been an essential part of this project, acting as an extension of the academic branch, which is itself devoted to training writers, art historians and cultural-affairs managers. Far from subscribing a single stylistic trend or current, the gallery has opted for a constructive heterodoxy that has allowed it to remain an open and varied exhibiting space, hosting a sizeable number of contemporary art shows, both national and international in scope. It has thus attained its main objective: promoting a thematic and formal diversity by presenting a broad range of both new and widely recognized artists.
The opening of the exhibition Espejismos and the presentation of the printed exhibition book, edited by Grupo Romo, will take place on Wednesday, 25 May, at 19:00 pm in Galería Planta Alta and Espacio Visual of Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm and will be open until Wednesday, 22 June.
Espejismos Javier Cruz
Centro de Cultura Casa Lamm
Galería Planta and Espacio Visual
www.galeriacasalamm.com.mx
