LUZAZUL summarizes the personal and recognizable imagery of Madrid-born artist Irene Cruz. The photographs that make up this series are clear examples of the cinematic scenes that the artist usually creates and on them we can enjoy some of the most frequent elements of her production: women (and men) without faces or identities that occupy enigmatic landscapes and somehow face their loneliness and desire, their melancholy and their vulnerability. With these elements Cruz presents an intimate and personal universe ... a universe with which she encourages us to feel, reflect, experience:  

"I want them to picture this, that they feel the wet earth under their bare feet, that they will get lost in a natural space and likewise in a temporal one, that they reflect, attracted by the mystery of my images." 

It seeks especially to highlight the dreamlike and almost surreal atmosphere that looms above all her works, especially thanks to a poetic, bucolic, melancholy inducing light. Despite them being scenes constructed with recognizable and palpable elements, that light transports us to an almost dreamlike world in which reality and fiction, memory and present, life and dream are intermingled. In her photographs and videos, dreams and memories seem to finally materialize, making us evoke, without a doubt, a few words from the well-known German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940): "matter is what is dreamed up." 

 

Naiara Valdano