Can You Stay With Me Tonight
Something momentous happened to humanity a year after David Antonio Cruz’s first Chicago show in 2019. Back then, as gallery verbiage put it : “Cruz’s deeply empathetic gaze enlightens the viewer to those overlooked but urgently salient experiences” of “his black and brown subjects” who have been the “victims” of “extreme injustice”. It’s a message still trending throughout the art world.
It’s not that we no longer need to be enlightened about injustice, but Covid 19 made personal isolation a primary issue for just about everyone regardless of race, gender, class, or ethnic identity - and Cruz (b. 1974) confronts that universal loneliness with an edgy anxiety and shimmering beauty as old school as the sixth century mosaics at Ravenna. All of his figures are dressed just as smartly. The jazzy, colorful patterns on their shirts are sharp or blurry just where they need to be. If Cruz owned a boutique, I would shop there. But just like the bejeweled Byzantine royal family, not one of the faces is smiling. All of their somber eyes stare right back at the viewer -- as if they were scrutinizing you, rather than the other way around. None of the men depicted are young or especially attractive, but all of them feel quite real and present. This is not the queer world of awkward arousal and confusion. It’s more like David Hockney’s precise world of loneliness, desire, and self interest. As the title of the exhibition puts it: “I cut from the middle to get a better slice”
The spherical space helmets worn by some of the figures in his last show are now gone. No one feels that alienated any more. Some of the figures do, however, wear a kind of blue-green vinyl glove - as if they were still leery of skin-to-skin contact. More importantly, the backgrounds are now tinted - while the old monochrome backgrounds have migrated over to their own panels. They present a ghostly alternative reality, haunted by spectral faces and writhing limbs. A bright, bold and colorful world for the living - a dark, retreating, colorless world for the dead.
Cruz has developed his own, uplifting style of figure painting. Pictorial space is flat. The figures don’t just sit on the surface, they appear to emanate from the wall. Contours are strongly emphasized with contrasting tones that may defy reality. Between the curvaceous edges, the areas of pattern or solid color glow, as if lit from behind rather than from ambient light. It’s similar to the translucent sheets of glass locked within the sinuous lines of lead in the great cathedral windows of the Middle Ages. In both, the effect is transcendent. Every area of body, clothing, furniture, or background seems to erupt off the surface , demanding attention. The viewer must respond. Spirit has entered the room.
The masterpiece here is “Can you stay with me tonight ?” (the full text reads: “canyoustaywithmetonight_causeyouarehere,youarehere,andweareherewithyou”), It’s a monumental 6X8 diptych showing nine men ensconced on a giant sofa, much like hors d'oeuvres on a serving tray: so fresh, so yearning, so sincere. None of them interacting or touching - all looking out at the viewer and asking "Will you pick me?". All of them are well dressed and the ambiance is tropically festive with an “aspirational aesthetic of luxury and fashion”, not unlike the 18th Century aristocrats painted by Hyacinthe Rigaud. You want them all to find the love they need - just as you want the saints in a religious diptych to intercede with the divine. Sustaining a community of faith has not been the intention of mainstream Western painting since the Baroque. David Antonio Cruz has just revived it.
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onedayi’llturnthecornerandi’llbereadyforit, 2019
(shown in 2019)
Hyacinths Rigaud, Gaspard de Gueidan, 1738
BTW - Gaspard was not born to the high aristocracy, but through marriage, investment, and strategy he almost achieved it.
