KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is proud to participate at Untitled Art (Miami) with Critical Error, a solo exhibition of Uruguayan artist Guillermo Garcia Cruz, on view from December 5 to December 10, 2023 (Booth A58).

For his first solo exhibition at Untitled Art, Guillermo Garcia Cruz has created a series of unique paintings surveying the full breadth of his “Glitched” series of paintings, following its evolution from the original series of black on linen works – with their variety of increasingly complex glitches – to the new series in the primary colors which underlie the color black. 

In the era of artificial intelligence and deepfakes, our eyes will no longer be able to identify reality through the images they receive. The only “truth” will be the basic elements and colors that create the digital image. It is those essential, minimal elements that Guillermo Garcia Cruz captures in its geometric works on canvas, where hard-edge abstraction seems to glitch and pixelate, like a computer error run amok. In doing so, the artist is also directly engaging with the larger history of Latin American abstraction, taking it into the digital age. Further complicating his version on abstraction, Garcia Cruz’s black canvases juxtapose four different painting applications – glossy, matte, flat, textures, while the canvases in color combine red, green, and blue (RGB), the primary colors used in a digital display screen.

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).

Exhibition Catalogue Press Release Price List Art Works On View    Video on YouTube