Moonlight

 

The path of transformation begins in the body,

the soul moves itself through an intact eternal land,

I embrace its depths hoping to become one with the Earth.

 

The hopeless dust was once the burning lava,

I get lost in its dark blurred immensity,

a dot on the black fields melting against the tide.

 

Purple lines crush the brightness of the last sunset, 

fixed widened pupils broken by the incandescent sky, 

the forgotten rebellion of an exhausted soldier.

 

The patient water sublimates rusty wounds, 

turning them into ferocious scars of future legends, 

that will wipe away my fear and hunger. 

 

If only I could trap the wind in the center of my eyes, 

and erase my reasoning as it consumes the instinct, 

then I could fuse my conscience with the crying landscape. 

 

Its spirit cradles me softly in an ethereal lap, 

carrying me as a child till the next moon awakes, 

my existence is captured by the purest beauty. 

 

 

The broken waves are stopped by these bare hands, 

they are pushed to a frozen shore,

that receives them kindly anticipating their death. 

 

The ice unleashes the mind from an unwanted slumber, 

there will be no blood, but the heart remains, 

I promise this won’t be a permanent farewell.

 

I’ve found my roots in the birth of a volcano, 

holding my origin back as a curious animal, 

beating lifeless dreams among the stones.

 

Nadia Túnez

Writer & Muse

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Moonlight, a trip to the center of the essence.

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Imagine that as in Le petit Prince, the universal work of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, our plane crashes into an inhospitable place, in this case of earth and dark rocks, lava fields covered with fluorescent mosses, mountains of rhyolite and obsidian of impossible shapes and colors, fumaroles that recreate a primeval environment, rivers and lakes in lunar valleys... Similarly, Irene Cruz is catapulted into this Icelandic setting, which appears to be the perfect setting for Moonlight, a rugged, apocalyptic and at the same time terribly beautiful series – despite the harshness of the environment. Through images full of narrative and meaning, she invites the viewer to embark on an ignominious journey full of stimuli, which aims to discover to us what we may not know about ourselves.

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And for this purpose, uses the available strategies such as luminosity. The photographer captures the intense light of that strange, calm and silent island, the blackish earth and the glacial debris. Its camera captures the dynamism of a panorama made up of ancient telluric movements and environments broken by the force of ice and fire; an intensely bluish landscape thanks to the icy surface that gradually returns to the ocean to wait for a new turn to be deposited again in the glaciers, a deforested environment, a desert of others through which a clairvoyant character guides us. This girl with violet hair and with the lunar phases tattooed on her skin is the alter ego (of the artist, yes, but also of each of us) that Cruz puts at our disposal to accompany us in this unique story that we will build individually.

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Perhaps we must enter this spectral landscape, get lost in the blue ices to find that point of silence, the intimate gloom where all noise ceases and recognizes our interrupted connection with the little things. It is our rushed lives, our daily gallop and our maelstrom militating against ourselves, that makes us lose our virgin gaze, cleansed of prejudice and subjectivity.

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Irene Cruz puts all the means so that as the girl who guides us, we can feel the mist of the Atlantic that tarnishes the eyes when we want to scrutinize the horizon, the subtle rain on our skin that wets without feeling it, that we do not know if it comes down from the clouds or rises from the earth. And may this sense of unreality bring us back to the moment of childhood where every discovery was astonishing: that is the goal of the photographer.

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In The Little Prince it is precisely recounted, as its protagonist being a child with an overflowing imagination, and from that look of innocence, he draws these profiles of hats- which are actually elephants devoured by boas. By showing it to the elders, they, who understand nothing, advise him to abandon the drawing and to dedicate himself to other ventures, such as being an aircraft pilot, which he will end up exercising as he grows up. As an adult, when the traveling protagonist of the story finds someone who finds him to be minimally lucid, he subjects them to the drawing experiment to corroborate his thoughts, but invariably they tell him that it is a hat. The protagonist then refrains from speaking to his interlocutor about the boa, the elephant, the virgin jungle and the stars. "Getting on their same level, I was talking to them about bridge, golf, politics and ties. And my interlocutor was delighted to meet such a reasonable man." 

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Like the boa and the elephant, the perception of art is a matter of unique and personal vision of the artist and requires the viewer an added effort of imagination to interpret this look. Irene Cruz submits to the free judgment of those who contemplate her work, putting at her disposal a mood, a lunar landscape and a girl in a silver swimsuit. Moonlight is a metaphor (the reader will have already intuited it) from his favorite book, The Little Prince; a nod to that story of a pilot lost in the desert who finds a small prince coming from another planet. But even if this story has served the artist as inspiration, it is not necessary to know this fact that for those who contemplate the work capture the main idea. From there, Irene Cruz surrenders to the aesthetic rating of the viewer. But isn't it inevitable that each viewer's gaze will transcend a different truth? Is the creator prepared so that the viewer is not a passive element? It is a boa devouring an elephant, but what if it is also a hat?

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The answer to these questions is so true to the extent that each of us experiences this personal journey that Cruz gives us. It is not easy to strip off the veil that covers our eyes to face a work of art and build an account of this strange land, the alien girl and the broken plane. The truth, the certainty lies in the gaze of those who manage to analyze from the essence and naivety, - ultimately with the astonished eyes of novelty - and is able to build this magical universe, regardless of whether it was the vision of the creator or the viewer himself.

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Elvira Rilova

Comisaria y gestora cultural

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