The pleasures of down below

... her paintings are homeless, ashamed, miserable, they have accidents, they get dirty, they are dragged across the floor, are torn and ripped, they fall on their butt, they bully and get bullied, they are crumpled and scrunched, severed and crushed. They endure this stream of mishaps and are transformed by them (recycled as the artist notes). At times they are abandoned in a studio corner and, from one day to the next, they can change from being something, to becoming nothing and re-emerge as something again. They are dejected but they persevere …

… de la Cruz’s paintings promote the idea of a sensuous, direct and familiar contact with the world around us, as opposed to the rarified abstractions of the modernist canon. They present us with a challenge to the traditional bourgeois ideals of predictability, stability and closure, of which the painting is the most obvious icon. As the artist observes: the moment I cut through the canvas I get rid of the grandiosity of painting. The processes of cutting, patching up, fitting back together, re-assembling are central to de la Cruz’s practice …