KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is delighted to present conceptual artist Guillermo Garcia Cruz’s first solo exhibition in New York, titled SCREEN I, on view from September 7 to October 10, 2023, with a collectors’ preview Thursday, September 7th from 5-8pm and the artist reception on Friday, September 8th from 5-8pm.

Humanity lives in the most technologically advanced era and faces an unprecedentedly fast-paced digital age. By inserting digital iconography into his work, Garcia Cruz merges this contemporary reality into painting, one of the world’s oldest artistic expressions.

In this show the artist expands his geometric abstractions from his “Glitch” paintings to introduce his newest exploration, the Screen series. Glitches are unexpected digital features of a computer program or system that can sometimes correct itself. Other times, the error remains. In the Screen series, using white, the result of the addition of every screen light color, and black, the absence of all of them, Garcia Cruz creates geometric analog “flaws” with segments of his Glitch paintings that shift out of phase and return to their original alignment. Something out of the ordinary has occurred. The Glitch stands for deeper questions about changes in society. What is temporary? What is permanent? Is the apparently innocuous Glitch the prelude to a complete system failure? In the ever- accelerating world we live in, thanks to the internet, the Glitch may seem like a pessimistic outlook on our collective trajectory. However, the key to its digital meaning is that it is fixable. The error is observable. Garcia Cruz’s paintings make the errors visible and repetitious, offering us the opportunity to alter and correct the system that is our world, as reflected in “screens” reminiscent of our electronic devices. Remaining open and inquisitive, Garcia Cruz invites the audience to imagine the potential good put into the world through new inputs.

Equally significant to Garcia Cruz’s contemporary conceptual practice is his Uruguayan art historical lineage. Geometric Abstraction is a familiar art form throughout Latin America. As a student of art, finding a movement specific to his country and culture was important. Garcia Cruz learned about the Madí art (1940s-1950s) after his shift from figuration to abstraction. Artists (Uruguayans) and Gyula Kosice(Argentinian) espoused in their manifesto that avant-garde art at the time was still contained by and subject to the rectangular frame. Like Quin, Rothfuss, and Kosice, Garcia Cruz makes the outside of his work follow the inside, rather than the other way around.

Pulling on the historical and the contemporary moment into his works, Garcia Cruz layers his questions about the world, his identity and national history, and the wider international ethos around change and technology into his paintings. The conceptual underpinnings of his work deal with the understanding that change is inevitable. One who welcomes and embraces it will have an easier time in the unending onslaught of our time. Garcia Cruz sends a hopeful message that “Movement and change is the new stability.”

About the Artist: Guillermo García Cruz (1988, Montevideo, Uruguay). Professor of Visual Arts by IPA, Montevideo, Uruguay. He has been part of Washington Studio School and Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Washington, USA. His work has been presented at group and solo exhibitions in Montevideo, Sao Paulo, Lima, Buenos Aires, Mexico, Miami, Washington DC, New York, Madrid, Barcelona, Timisioara, Lisbon and Tianjin. Among other articles and mentions, in 2019 he has been highlighted globally among the 12 artists in the focus of the next generation, by the Ibero-American site Arte Informado. He currently lives and works in the city of Dubai, UAE, developing an interdisciplinary body of work, made of painting, photography, action and installation, exploring a contemporary approach to the geometric question and the different conceptual interpretations that stem from its formal disruption.

Artist Statement: My work is composed by a series of paintings and sculptures that play with the formal legacy left by Latin American concretism, 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 MADI 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.

In my work I offer a formal rapprochement with the constructivist heritage, whilst proposing an attempted rupture that occurs in the very structure of the work. This collapse that occurs within the object is most evident in my glitched works – 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.

I 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” – a term common in the computer context. Repetition, movement, transformation, the limits between interior and exterior are some of the visible concerns in my 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 are not antagonistic, but rather share the same terrain and interest.

Collections: Cisneros Fontanalls, Cruz Diez Family Collection, The Hearst, Collection, D+C Collection, Northwestern University Collection, Luis Bassat Collection, Jorge M. Pérez Collection, George and Linda Kelly Collection, Alberto Rebasa Collection, DiGood Collection, Carlos Manzano Collection, La Escalera Collection, Recoleto Colllection, David Segarra collection, Prince Dushan of Serbia collection, Cerro Gallinero Centro de Arte y Naturaleza (Land Art Museum)

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