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Brussels – Using images from Facebook or Instagram as reference, the Spanish artist Barrabás Cruz simulates in his paintings a digital environment in which he invites us to immerse ourselves in a reflection on how social networks configure our understanding of society and its relationship to the individual imagination and the collective imagination.
Barrabás Cruz finds it “very interesting” that people present themselves on social networks, “a very modern idea”, he told EFE during a visit to the exhibition “Feed”, currently on display in Brussels.
“In the past you showed yourself to three, four, five people, today you show yourself to many people and you have a public profile. I am very interested in what we say I want people to know about me,” reflects Cruz (1992, Alcázar de San Juan, Ciudad Real).
The exhibition moves between figuration and abstraction and is closely linked to the world of dreams, because “the relationships when painting are very similar to those when dreaming”, says the Castile-La Mancha artist, who arrived in Brussels eight years ago.
Despite speaking out about the use of social networks, Cruz noted that he was not trying to raise moral issues or point out “issues that need to be addressed,” insisting he was simply trying to reflect on it.
“These complexities of contemporary life interest me,” says the man from Alcázar, who graduated in fine arts from the Complutense University of Madrid and the Kunst University of Berlin, and who participated in the 2022 and 2023 ARCOs.
The exhibition is part of the 2024 Brussels Festival program, and Barrabás Cruz stressed that everyone will bring different ideas. “Some children will definitely take something different from a man or a woman, someone who lives in Lebanon or someone who lives in Tomeloso on the day of the inauguration,” Cruz observed.
The exhibition delves into contemporary lifestyles, the way people present themselves in society, in their interests, in their memories or in their identities.
In this context, his work is not immune to the cultural references of the current Belgian environment, such as Surrealism and Flemish triptychs, references to the German painter Josef Albers in terms of colors, and to René Magritte in terms of color, referring to the Belgian humor.
The exhibition is open until July 19 at the multifunctional space of the Spanish Embassy in Belgium, LAB (Laboratory of Spanish Art and Science in Belgium), divided into two rooms.
Some of these works are exhibited in the library of the Catalan poet and diplomat “Josep Cana”, where the paintings have food as the theme, in fact one of the paintings references Cana’s collection of poems “Delicious Fruits”, which begins in the noucentista movement.
The paintings located in the second room of the exhibition refer to games of chance, to large buildings of the past such as aqueducts or mills, but also to ideas of resistance, as evidenced by the canvases of feet firmly perched on the ground or the columns that appear in one of the paintings.
Tada Bastida, cultural counselor at the Spanish Embassy, highlighted the links between the exhibition and the embassy, such as the reference to the diplomat Cana, and the presence of paintings of aqueducts, a symbol of European union and representing solidarity between nations. Efei
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