What Remains

Colored pencil, oil marker, and acrylic paint and pens on wood panel, 10" x 10", 2020 Signed lower right — Rene Juan de la Cruz

A moment of tension held in ten square inches of wood. The panel is architecturally divided, isometric hexagonal planes built with the precision of a trained graphic hand carve the surface into distinct zones, creating a geometric structure that feels both designed and inhabited. Within that structure, two worlds exist simultaneously and in full confrontation with each other.

To the right, one presence commands the space. A large crowned face, crown sitting directly above a spiral eye marked with an X that looks back at you without apology. Bold, calm, sovereign. The raw warmth of the exposed wood grain becomes its ground, its territory, its silence.

To the left, everything erupts. A dense swarm of the artist's subconscious vocabulary blazes through fields of crimson and yellow, tiny crowned heads, X-eyed figures whose eyes are real and watching, halos, orbits, a spiky orb pulsing at the lower left, white dot trails dissolving into the chaos. Dozens of beings living, moving, peeking through the noise. At the upper right, a single simple outlined head watches the entire scene from a quiet distance, alone.

What holds it all together is what the crowned face refuses to do, react. It simply remains.

Made in 2020. The circumstances live in the tension, not in the title.