Do First, Think Later

For Fernão Cruz, art and life are inseparable. The 28-year-old Lisbon-based artist imaginatively mines his own existence to comment on the human condition. Through a series of theatrical exhibitions that have presented poetic paintings, sculptures and installations to explore personal issues, traumas and desires over the past five years, he has created a complex body of work that’s put him on the path to his most engaging show to date, INSONE (INSOMNIAC) at Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art.

Cruz’s book, Stretching can be easy, provides a road map to understanding the depth and development of his psychoanalytical works. Self-published as a print-on-demand edition in 2018, the 268-page monograph candidly documents his studio life and early paintings and sculptures, together with his artist’s residency in China and breakout solo shows in Lisbon. Compiled from his own photographs, the publication exposes his do-it-yourself process for making playful sculptures with paper, tape and plaster, while offering insight into his gradual shift from paint-ing figurative subjects to more abstract, yet symbolic, canvases.

His idiosyncratic way of working was first displayed in the 2018 one-person exhibition, Long Story Short, at Balcony Contemporary Art Gallery, where he presented large-scale paintings of layered abstractions alongside figurative depictions of a household iron and a machine gun. The wall-works were juxtaposed with handmade sculptures depicting legs growing out of a rock and a giant electrical cord and plug, together with assemblages that cleverly combined smaller paintings with ladders, boots and suitcases over a cardboard-and-tape-collaged floor. Toying with the spectator’s eye and mind, the lively show created a heady narrative from things that were both theoretical and referential.

His 2019 solo show with Balcony Gallery, The White Goodbye: what goes in through the eyes and comes out through the hands was an offsite project in decorative rooms that were lit with only natural light. Offering dozens of surreal white sculptures made from hand-shaped Styrofoam that was coarsely covered with plaster, the haunting exhibition commemorated the death of his beloved grandfather—with the creation of the monumental sculptures and their display in a graveyard- or garden-like setting becoming a cathartic way for the artist to deal with his grief.

Two curated solo shows at celebrated art centers in 2021 brought an even greater level of in-vention to—and a much broader recognition for—the artist’s distinctive works. Armored Room, curated by Marta Mestre at the José de Guimarães International Center for the Arts, constructed a dreamlike dimension permeated with personal references joined by inspirations from the center’s eclectic collection. Papier-mâché, plaster and wood sculptures were influenced by the collection’s African sculptures and black-and-white paintings on canvas, bordered with colored fabric, recreated illustrations from Scottish writer JM Barrie’s story of Peter Pan, a fictional boy who refused to grow up. With figurative pieces cast from his family member’s body parts and such curious sculptures as a slithering blue snake and a monkey climbing a ladder displayed above a canary-yellow floor, the dramatic objects and theatrical installation created a spiritually charged scenario.

The second exhibition, Biting Dust, was curated by Leonor Nazaré at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum. Presenting ten narrative paintings and twenty archetypal sculptures (most of them bronzes) especially created for the show, the metaphoric works were presented in two distinct spaces connected by a dark passageway. The paintings depicted a man falling on stage, a road-way leading to an unknown destination and a snake-covered brick wall, which doubled as a half-open doorway to the room with the sculptural pieces. Standouts among the sculptures were a plaster figure of an old man sitting on a bench as a large plaster swan flies off with a real robe in its clutches and a cardboard-constructed crown, cast in bronze, resting on a plinth that’s labeled with the artist’s name and date of birth, 1995. Reflecting on life, death, loss and decline, the poetic artworks became allegorical actors in a self-referential play.

That brings us to INSONE (INSOMNIAC), the most dynamic and psychologically revealing installation of paintings and sculptures the innovative artist has created. Exploring his mental and physical state, the twenty-one abstract paintings and singular figurative sculpture create a constellation of artworks conceptually connected to the body of the artist. Cruz has labeled the group of paintings Cérebro, which mean brain in Portuguese, and he refers to the sculpture as Orfão, or Orphan in English. The paintings are internal landscapes—they reflect the inner thoughts and corporal feelings of the artist, released onto the canvases. The sculpture represents the body of the artist (the person who made the paintings) and the paintings embody the brain activity taking place in this seemingly dead or dreaming figure.

Whereas his earlier figurative paintings had been influenced by Paula Rego, Francis Bacon and Leon Kossoff, his recent abstract canvases convey more of a kinship with Sigmar Polke, Albert Oehlen and Laura Owens. The paintings weren’t made one by one, several were painted simultaneously—layer-by-layer, moving from one to the next. They are cousins, siblings—interchangeable parts of the constellation. The process of creating them was additive, never subtractive; if a change needed to be made, more paint was added. They were painted improvisationally, like jazz, like bebop, where an action with the paint or brush was quickly met by a reaction with another type of a mark, often made with another tool or technique, color or structure. The artist had to give up control, let the hands speak. He had to get into a zone—do first, think later.

The painting Broken Constellation (Cérebro) shows Cruz’s experimentation in the most minimal means. A series of black lines was added to the canvas to signify a broken network, a breakdown in the system. Next, the dotted ground pattern was formed by applying paint to bubble wrap and then pressing it onto the canvas. Lastly the shadows were created to lend an illusionistic dimension to the image, making it seem more real, and gray areas added to make that reality less clear.

Vomit (Cérebro) might be showing a mental reaction to the body getting sick, but the titles of the works came after the action of painting. The titles express conditions the artist has experienced and what he now sees in the canvas, but not what was going through his mind when making it. For example, Fly on the eye (Cérebro) suggests blurred vision, which fits the fuzzy nature of the abstraction we see, but it also experimentally evokes a kind of Brice Marden-like brushed line layered by expressionistic pours and drips of paint overlaid with Laura Owens-like blotches of rich black impasto brushwork, which adds to the out of focus look of everything below—thus, the thought of a fly on the eye.

Cruz painted layer upon layer upon layer. After one layer was applied, something else was done, usually in opposition. Like Georges Mathieu, another artist Cruz admires, the action was often performative. In Sand in my joints (Cérebro), Cruz makes the back-and-forth scribbles by applying the paint directly from the tube—a method that Mathieu used (and it was also a painting technique employed by Vincent van Gogh, another artist who painted with emotion.)

When it was time to stop, Cruz would start another painting, or add another layer to a canvas already in progress. In making the series, he didn’t want to be mannered; instead he was seeking difference, a metamorphosis within his constellation of canvases. The painting Swarm (Cérebro) magnificently came to life through Cruz composing contrasting layers of lines, grids, dots, and colors. Max Ernst, when discussing his famous frottage paintings—made with rubbings of rough wooden floors—said that he felt like he was a witness to the making of his own work, which is what Cruz is here. Meanwhile, diverging from that approach, Grotto (Cérebro) took its gray bubble wrap background as a point of departure when hand-painting larger dots in clustered patterns to simulate the bubbles over brightly colored layered grids.

The sculpture, Orphan, is totally different in style. It’s a realistic portrayal of the artist in a haunting scenario. Made from actual scans of Cruz’s nude body, it was digitally printed at an equal scale in parts, perfectly fused together and then coated with a gray ash. Looking like a frozen figure from the volcanic eruption that calcified the good people of Pompei as they perished, his body is being picked apart by pigeons—even while he holds a piece of bread, the bird’s preferred food, in his outstretched hand. Conceivably seeing the paintings as they eat the artists flesh, they absorb his fears and phobias.

The paintings and sculpture in the exhibition should be viewed as a gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, rather than solely as individual artworks. The show is an opera, conceived as one complete work with different elements that come together to tell a captivating story. The insomniac can never rest, nor can the artist, who is forever compelled to create.

Paul Laster

New York City, November 2023