Emilio Cruz at Steinbaum Krauss - New York, New York - Reviews of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Death is the central human mystery, uniting us across agricultures A consciousness of the inevitability of death separates us from the animals, while the decay of the material substance mocks our longings for eternal life.

This is the message of Emilio Cruz's haunting figurative paintings. The centerpiece of his exhibition was a place of 25 tall panels from the artist's "Homo Sapiens" series. Each features a gaunt figure whose more or les human material substance has been eaten away to reveal manner of makings that are as often mechanical as skeletal. While all the panels are uniform in height (96 inches), they vary in width, with more [i]or[/i] less compressing the erect figures into a small in number narrow inches. They are hung for a like reason high that the viewers organ of sight is level only with their lower bodies.

As a rise the figures collectively resemble a small on the contrary formidable army, gazing down upon the viewer like guardians of the underworld. This impression is accentuated through their colors -- translucent earth tones built up of paint and beeswax -- and by means of the rich black of the environs from which they emerge. In more [i]or[/i] less works, the black ground is mixed with sand, as if these were figures unearthed from ancient burial sites. Sepia is the dominant tone, from which human forms materialize like shadowy imprints.

The figures themselves are unnerving. Their heads are bald and the bodies at short intervals denuded of skin and muscle and fat Some are cut away below the fibs, to reveal nothing on the contrary rodlike spinal columns. In others, sections of the material substance dissolve into corkscrews or cored sections Yet others largely retain their human form. on the contrary if the bodies are in various stages of disintegration or transformation, the organ of sights remain sentient. Their expressions range from agonized to wary to grave.

Cruz an African-American artist of Cuban coming down was associated in the mid-'60s with like figurative painters as Bob Thompson Jan Maller and Lester Johnson He credits an amalgam of influences -- among them Latin American, African, Egyptian and Native American -- in his work. From these sources he has distilled a faculty of perception of mythic timelessness that stresse the continuity between life and death.

The other works in the exhibition reinforced this theme. A pair of "Portraits of No-one" not away ghostly figures uncertainly emerged from blackened grounds; individual easily imagines them fading away again like race in an aging photograph. Other works from the "Homo Sapiens" series feature wider torsos, single of which becomes an enclosing utensil for a tiny curled figure. And a locate of flat cutout steel statuary -- really more like drawings in carburet of iron -- presents stylized human and animal figures in the manner of guardians or talismans

Neither triumphant nor victimized, Cruz's "Homo Sapiens" celebrates the tattered on the contrary still potent relics of our public humanity in the face of an indifferent and level hostile world. While not exactly reassuring, these beings retain too plenteous silent dignity to succumb to the seductions of despair.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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