As you come closer and peer into the four walls of vinyl on vinyl, notice it peering back. It cannot be misconstrued, the countless eyes that breathe life into the dark, black walls of the gallery. Take a look and it will take a look back.
Forms, all seemingly familiar yet hauntingly unknown, are
sewn together, with no purpose of physical fluidity, weaving threads of irony
and creating a harmony of chaotic madness; a fair share of unstable mutations.
With the creeping feeling where the unknown seems familiar,
Rai Cruz finds refuge.
Rai Cruz’s one-man show ‘Unstable Mutations’ is nothing
short of unforgettable. Bringing street art into the confines of inner space is
in itself a feat, but he goes one step further and plays along with all kinds
of creatures, from the strange to the even stranger.
For his first one-man show, Rai Cruz has made a pretty big
impression.
City Creatures
Katrina Stuart Santiago
October 2012
The task of moving street art from public to private
space demands a necessary reassessment of its value. Graffiti after all is
necessarily a form of resistance, it’s presence on public walls carrying the
weight of rebellion. Its move to the gallery is graffiti’s undoing, where the
largeness of street art can only be stunted.
Unstable Mutations is a set of works that do not fall
into this trap, even as it is in a gallery, even when its images are borne of
the streets. These are not works made smaller by the move into private space,
as these are works that co-exist with its larger versions on public walls.
Think of it as an extension of the city streets, the
creatures here the new members of the community that public art inevitably
builds.
And it is a nation of creatures that grow out of the
city’s concreteness, that are borne of its daily grind. Whether large and on
public walls, or small and hanging in a gallery, these images speak of a city
at the crux of development and destruction, where everything evolves into
unknowable and unfamiliar, living and breathing, bodies. Ones that respond to
the city’s demands, ones who make up the marginal narratives we do not hear,
the people we do not see.
Those who live off our cities become creatures of its
undoing and decay. That they seem to be in constant evolution is there instability.
That they grow more and more creatively is the gift of urbanity and
development. These are the city’s inhabitants we refuse to see, the ones whose
noise we do not hear, the ones we leave behind as we enter the comfortable
clean walls of the homes we build.
The power of denial is such that we do not know our own
reflections.
But we have no choice now. They are here.
