Adam Cruces Explores the Frontier of ‘Necessary Evil’

Blue Velvet Projects lifted the veil on a new solo exhibition by American artist Adam Cruces, now on view until October 26, 2024. Using rich pastels and sculptures, Necessary Evil explores the intricate relationship between humans and nature, marked by feelings of tranquility and danger. As inner and outer worlds close in on one another, Cruces sends a flare from the American plains.

The artist brings a touch of Texan flair to Zürich, channeling rural scenery, agriculture and Western films. The white walls of the gallery are lined with pastels of deserts and mountains, acting as windows into surreal landscapes. Familiar emblems of American culture, such as cowboy hats, anvils and apples dramatically fall through their dreamlike environments, caught in a slow-motion series of stills.

In song with the pastels on display, the exhibition features an assortment of sculptures. From scythes lodged in boulders to a swampy, ghillie-suited figure glaring down at gallery-goers, Cruces’ work makes mythological references while creating a new fiction of its own. Another series features a set of large mirrors adorned with water lilies. Whether they are clear, tinted or painted over entirely, the mirrors teeter between ideas of introspective self-reflection or a Narcissus-like fate.

“I tried to put things in perspective, but sometimes you’re just too close to it,” Cormac McCarthy writes in his neo-Western classic No Country for Old Men. Cruces brings this sentiment into a modern situation, refracting and reassembling it to the contemporary urgency of our shared environment.

Blue Velvet Projects
Birmensdorferstrasse 83,
8003 Zürich, Switzerland