PATRICK CRUZ: NADA NEW YORK

Wil Aballe Art Projects | WAAP is pleased to announce its participation in the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) art fair in New York. The fair takes place March 2 – 5, 2017, at Skylight Clarkson North, located at 572 Washington Street.

WAAP’s booth will feature works by artist Patrick Cruz, as well as other works by Ryan Quast, Jeff Hallbauer, and Maegan Hill Carroll.

Wil Aballe Art Projects (WAAP) will exhibit work by Manila-born, Vancouver-educated artist, PATRICK CRUZ. Cruz was born in the late 1980s, around the time when the Philippines chose its first female democratic president, Cory Aquino, and lived in Manila where the street life is colourful and noisy. For NADA NY 2017, Patrick Cruz will create an entirely new installation that reflects the visual energy of a Manila barrio, comprising of small canvas paintings, accumulated and arranged to cover the floor and extend all the way to the top of the walls. The installation parallels the urban and social vibe that permeates through Manila’s grungy organic dynamism. Cruz’s artistic production is a recognition of a nomadic, global cultural awareness. Within these unfolding layers, as well as the flow and exchange of familiar and foreign symbols, Cruz develops an aesthetic that is a contemporary interpretation of identity and globalism.

There’s nothing in Cruz’s installations that overtly signals a connection to a Filipino nationalistic history, rather as with the expansive topology of Cruz’s work, each individual part labours to produce a matrix of representative systems in an unspecific undercurrent of political asymmetry. Each canvas features a visceral surface of vibrating paint with motifs reminiscent of art that has historically been described as abstract primitivism.

The tone of this installation will be polyphonic, joyful and inclusive. The jurors of the prestigious $25,000 RBC Canadian Painting Competition 2015 said they awarded Patrick Cruz “based on his decidedly contemporary attitude towards painting. His brave approach, maximalist aesthetic and wild graphic sensibility set a provocative tone for emerging art in Canada.” He is an artist to watch internationally.