Marco Rountree Cruz

Marco Rountree Cruz

1982

MARCO ROUNTREE CRUZ / MEXICO CITY, 1982
He is one of the most promising yet understated artists on Mexico´s emerging scene. Self-taught, he developed a passion for drawing at a young age. In fact he came to art as a teenager via graffiti and then skateboarding and music, which brought him into the circle of La Panadería, an artist-run space founded by Miguel Calderón and Yoshua Okón in Mexico City (1994-2002), "I was lucky to live in Mexico City in the 1990s, to be involved with the 1990s generation, ´Rountree Cruz says, "I was able to meet these artists and learn from them without being intimidated by them. ´To compensate for his lack of academic training, friends and fellow artists gave him books to read, thus inspiring the first series of works that brought him critical acclaim. Untitled, like most of his pieces, these pieces consist of books with their pages folded, ´I am a bad reader´, the artist says ´I don´t usually read books, but I love the movement. When you fold pages, you make movement graphic. ´Reduced to geometrical shapes such as cylinders or hemispheres, the books become formal objects rather than items of everyday use. This shift in function is further enhanced by their display on wooden units such as shelves and tables that Rountree Cruz created himself and that mimic Minimalist installations. Cut-out books also inspired a series of collages of broken-up words that evoke musical scores, one of his other passions.

A reinterpretation of domestic objects and an interest in spatial organisation, both recurring aspects of Rountree Cruz´s oeuvre, are found in his other signature piece, an ongoing series of wall drawings realised with masking tape. These large-scale, ephemeral installations are created directly on the wall without preparatory sketches- a tribute to his well-honed drawing skills and early career as a graffiti artist. Initially he used ordinary blue masking tape found in Mexico City´s street markets, but he has since employed a broarder range of colours. The mostly abstract, colourful installations recall wall drawings by Sol LeWitt, an artist whom Rountree Cruz admires, although figures in the Socialist Realist style appear in some works as a humorous reference to the famed Mexican muralists of the 1930s.

Sources:
Photo: https://museoamparo.com/artistas/perfil/148/marco-rountree
Text: http://www.galeriaemmamolina.com/marco-rountree

Artist Works

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