"In fact, it creates a gap that invites us to reflect on the thin line that separates fact from fiction... interesting proposal."

Elmur.net

 

 

 

 

 

The audiovisual work of Irene Cruz together with the explanatory accompanying texts of choice invites us to think about our own vital boundaries. An immersion into the unexplored territories between light and darkness, a journey to travel with her through the instant when the day turns to mysterious night.

 

An invitation to cross the border between magic and reality, between the seen and the sensed, the continuous movement of the river and the strengthening stillness of the forest: the flow of a child’s swing and the ghost of what we cannot see or feel: that invisible thing that escapes the frame. 

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     Irene´s photos and videos show a poetic and raw naturalism. A Baroque and misty naturalism filtered by the visual metaphysics of Lars Von Trier and the visual poetry of Terence Malick. As Emile Zola said, naturalism can need no more than a fragment of nature to view through temperament. Irene Cruz´s temperament is like an anvil supporting the hammering of reality, and turning the dreadful pounding sound into a soft scream of reality and existential emptiness. 

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The crazy but very lucid Salvador Dalí boasted about his genuine naturalism when saying that he painted barefoot to feel the earth under his two feet. Irene Cruz photographs barefoot to feel the moist soil of the forest during the enchanted time of the late twilight.

 

Fly, flow, live and jump. To fall again heavily in the real soil, to feel the moist of the mist, no longer naturalism but turned into Romantic German poetry.

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  Falling in the wet earth, barefoot, childish and bewildered, looking into the dark forest, knowing that only by looking is it possible to discover, even when there is no light.

 

Making mistakes and learning from them. Erasing the digital board to re-write with an analogue pen: dying to be reborn, stronger and more powerful. Understanding nature in the monist way of Spinoza, as a totality submerged in nature, a nature that captures us and makes us think of the physical and heavy as it were part of the soul.

 

Eduardo Rodríguez Merchán, Mentor & Professor at the UC

 

 

 

 

This work invites the audience to think about “the borders” between fiction and reality, coincidence and causality... The key of this project belongs to what is expressed in the English word “liminal”- referring either to take up a certain position at the very beginning of a process or being at both sides of a border or threshold at the same time. That is to say, to be between night and day, between calmness and restlessness. However, it is not a limit. It is a road, a bridge to cross.

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    Everything must flow or must have flown previously. The forest stands as a metaphor of nature in general. I'm making reference here to Baruch Spinoza's words : “Of everything whatsoever a cause or reason must be assigned, either for its existence, or for its non-existence—e.g. if a triangle exists, a reason or cause must be granted for its existence; if, on the contrary, it does not exist, a cause must also be granted, which prevents it from existing,(...)” 

Irene Cruz 

 

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“All things have necessarily flowed, or always followed, by the same necessity and in the same way as from the nature of a triangle it follows, from eternity and to eternity, that its three angles are equal to two right angles. 

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In nature there is nothing contingent, but all things have been determined from the necessity of the divine nature to exist and produce an effect in a certain way."

Baruch Spinoza