The empty, the vacant, the unoccupied, are some of the ideas that Irene Cruz (1987) addresses in her latest photographic series Urlaub. Vacation. Retreat and Recover. An anxiety of emptiness floods her artwork. The emptiness of bare trees, the uninhabited house, the cloudless sky of a cold and faint blue, the lonely road or the abandoned Ferris wheel. It is a necessary emptiness which allows one to be emptied only to be fulfilled later on, to recover. That is how Irene Cruz unifies her reflection about vacation: “Vacation: from vacare: be unoccupied”. In ancient times it was also understood like that, as a retreat from the tumult of the city. In this sense, the artist digs deeper into the concept that spreads around all her artwork, the return to nature; understood as a system that runs the cosmos, from which we all come and to which we must return in a constant flow.

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     But this long-awaited emptiness, even if profusely esthetically reflected in much of the series, is merely suggested as an outline. The fence impedes entry into the place she yearns for. Her figure tries to spin around with the Ferris wheel, bury her feet into the mud or soar with the trees, in an effort of transubstantiation in accordance with her monistic sense of the world.

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      The autumnal landscape and the abandoned Ferris wheel divide into two the idea of vacation that gives tittle to the artwork. The old amusement park Spreepark (Berlin), holiday resort, uninhabited and in ruins, is covered by the autumnal undergrowth that highlights its decline. The feeling is, from here, ambiguous and disturbing, distinctive of the “Stimmungslandschaft” (Emotional landscape) of the German romanticism that the artist has already captured in previous series. The German title Urlaub (vacations) is a direct reference to it. The gothic ruins of Caspar David Friedrich have been replaced by modern civilization and its attempt to make use of the time given by means of the ludic, in a retreat in which spinning on the Ferris wheel makes it possible to go back in time, until one reconnects with one’s inner child. Now the park is closed to visitors, it is a forbidden place, wherein the bushes fused with the ruins¸ there is no retreat now, only the wind spins the wheel.

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      Multiple reflections are woven into this last series by Irene Cruz although, as is common in her artwork, they culminate in a deep statement about nature, and on this occasion also about time and space, or rather its lack thereof: the emptiness. The realization of this project has also supposed a lucky reencounter with the light that inspired her first series “Innes Tales” (2011) in Berlin; as well as a return to a project initiated in May, during the spring, when, as in the last days of autumn, she can capture the soft blue light that casts all over her photos. 

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Sol Izquierdo de la Viña, Art historian & curator