The Brooklyn Rail

KATES-FERRI PROJECTS presents Uruguayan conceptual artist Guillermo Garcia Cruz’s (b. 1988) first solo exhibition in New York. On view from September 7 through October 10, 2023, SCREEN I includes eighteen works that showcase Cruz’s geometric mastery. An expansion of his prior “Glitch” series, this new “Screen” series is a digital experiment in analog form—blending white, or the sum of all screen-light colors, and black, or the absence of those same colors. Here, Cruz creates intentional flaws in segments of his earlier paintings, shifting them so subtly that viewers can watch the works realign themselves.

While SCREEN I consists entirely of acrylics on shaped canvases, each with a custom birch frame, Cruz sees the works as a system of installations rather than a series of paintings. The show is an experiment involving what the artist calls “error,” or the standard error message reminiscent of the early internet that would appear on a frozen computer screen. This is a metaphor, Cruz explains, for the temporal disconnect of the changes we experienced a decade ago and those we observe today: an analog depiction of the digital realm, if you will. Here the artist implies that we may receive an error message leaving a trail of windows in its wake—but what if there is no error? What if the device in question, the computer or smartphone, is grappling with something so new that there is in fact no mistake? Is society changing faster than the rate at which we can keep up?

Cruz would like the public to see this series, and all his work, as a question rather than a statement. A philosopher at heart, the artist has long been fascinated with geometric shapes. Early in his career, he focused on figurative painting, only later pivoting to abstraction. While visiting Peru and Mexico for residencies, Cruz quickly learned that artists in these countries had thousands of years of history and archeology at their disposal; his native Uruguay, to the artist, seemed to lack longstanding traditions, in large part due to the influx of Europeans in the 1500s.

How might one recover these traditions? What defines a nation’s art? These are the questions Cruz asked when he returned to Uruguay. The artist learned that constructivism—geometry and contemporary art in general—proved integral to Uruguayan culture; while brought in from Russia, this practice deeply inspired South American artists like Joaquín Torres-García, a master modernist who experimented with the repetition of elements, like in pre-Columbian textiles. While studying at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, DC, Cruz fully embraced this practice. In this same vein, Cruz’s shaped canvases are the result of a Connecticut residency that introduced him to wood, and that inspired him to build frames in alignment with the craft-oriented Madí movement of 1940s Uruguay. Cruz appreciated how wood, materially speaking, allowed him to see all the different systems at play in his works. Initially, he created the frames himself, though now he tends to work with framers—taking on the role of a producer and working with his collaborators to build the birch frames.

The artist’s process resembles that of an investigation in this way. Moving from the flat and matte to the shiny and textured, Cruz prioritizes balance in his technique—and in his use of acrylic paint. Natural layers of acrylics enliven the works, showcasing the humanity behind the geometry. Brushstrokes are visible, even if they’re placed inside the artist’s signature rectangles, and the compositions themselves depict Cruz’s bodily movement and the rawness of the surface.

All eighteen works in the series are captivating, a combination of the traditional language of painting and the modern concept of geometric abstraction. Cruz seamlessly infuses them with concepts from the digital world, creating an effect not unlike that of a screen. His use of the color black—the absence of color—is designed to evoke an inactive device, the rectangular void of a television or phone or tablet. When these same devices are turned on, they exude light, which is the reason Cruz uses white in his works alongside the black: to create a sense of activation. Subtly, the viewer may take in hints of colors (think reds, greens, and blues), the primary colors of light that generate the digital image. The artist isn’t terribly strict about this practice, though he admits it makes him feel more grounded in his work.

Cruz treats shapes in a similar fashion. While a glitch may take any form, he set out to determine how different lines and compositions affected viewers psychologically. Consider the 40 by 30 inch Screen XXIIINY c (2023), which, like every work in the show, is entirely devoid of curves; it depicts broken—or frozen—vertical rectangles, one disjointed near the top and the second toward the bottom, both of them carefully placed inside of the skewed birch frame and “error”-inspired backdrop to create the illusion of a glitch. The result is a sense of mild discomfort from which the viewer may struggle to look away. Cruz, through the black-and-white compositions that make up SCREEN I, hopes audiences will lean into this discomfort—and embrace the changes it represents. This, after all, is part and parcel of the modern world.