NADA New York 2022

Walter Cruz Solo Presentation

May 5th - May 8th, 2022

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present From Your Lips, To God’s Ears, a solo debut by multidimensional artist Walter Cruz. The exhibition brings together in full tilt; a suite of Cruz’s seminal media laden paintings and sculptures which have been in development over the course of the last years. Entering the booth feels like battle, as the viewer grapples with a myriad of materials, imagery, and techniques that all seem to merge together in an instant. Their simultaneous effort and ease makes it feel as if Cruz doesn’t make them, but literally wills them into existence. The artist’s fascination with knots stems from his daily meditation practice, wherein the knot became a way to correspond, relate, and react to a world and a self, that is only meant to live in flux.

The entangled works themselves arrive in our mind full of connotations with a history that runs as deep as human existence; a material that has been used to both build civilizations, and used in ways to try and destroy it. Cruz utilizes this controversial apparatus to ask us to look into the deeper meanings of his intention, the rope and the knot, like us, came into the world naked…they, like us, are merely a vehicle employed with a purpose. Our parallel dimensions seem to be endless, because the knot represents a connection, a link with our fates, a binding destiny. While the surface-or the canvas-may act as a constant which represents our natural world, when wrapped, its dazzling warp and weft leaves us unable to find beginning and end, only a combination of moments which akin to our own lives, make up time itself.

But Cruz’s contemporary tablets are as skilful as they are sentimental, employing a multitude of textured painting techniques; combining text, collage, and found matter; which in the end feels more like entities than objects.  Despite their attached modern markers of slang words, t-shirts depicting deities, and other remnants of both labor and learning, they hold space in an ancient way, like a hieroglyph; they somehow link our past, present and future in one note.  They at once tether and release us; they hold our collective pain, joy, and everything in between.  They confer in a silent language that is understood only within, and decidedly dictate that we keep going.