Where They Meet

Color pencil and ballpoint pen on smooth 270gsm bristol paper, 9" x 12", Signed lower center — Rene Juan de la Cruz, 03/26

This is the piece where both sides of the practice find each other.

In the upper half, a bold geometric construction in red and blue anchors the composition, sharp, tilted, architectural, built with the precision of a graphic design trained hand. It doesn't apologize for being there. It holds its ground.

In the corners, the subconscious vocabulary answers back. Lower left, a green dude stands in full de la Cruz signature form, Jetsons aerodynamic legs and feet suggesting motion even at rest, X-eyes that are still eyes looking back, and above his head additional eyes that speak of double thinking, a second consciousness running parallel, crowned with Athena-like forms that fuse wisdom and royalty into one small figure. Upper left, a red fantastical rooster rendered in pure linear abstraction, red and black strokes intertwining in quadrant triangulation with halos, transmits quietly from its corner the way a signal tower transmits, present without announcing itself. Upper right, a third being in red stroke emanates greens and blues outward, radiating light or sound or something between the two, electric against the white of the bristol.

At the center, a monumental red orbit holds everything in balance. An X inside it. The axis the whole composition revolves around.

The state of mind was neutral. Not eruption, not tension, not aggressive force, just the two sides of a decades-long practice arriving at the same place at the same time, calmly, inevitably. The geometric and the subconscious. The constructed and the flowing. The graphic artist and the dude-maker.

Where they meet, it turns out, is here.