In the early 2000s, when Marina Cruz was a fine art student at the University of the Philippines, she was fascinated with making abstract prints. She played with textures and compositions, and wanted, in particular, to incorporate the pattern of gauze – a material that evokes a wound or fracture. She rummaged through closets in her grandmother’s home, hoping to find the fabric. Instead, she unearthed her mother’s old baptismal dress. Moved by the thought of her aging mother as a baby, she began to paint the clothes that her grandmother made for her children, uncovering the stories they told with each tear, wrinkle or stain.

Over two decades later, Cruz remains fixated on her family’s delicate fabrics. In Fractured Fabric, she uses the clothes to return to abstraction. Most of the works in the show do not depict pieces of clothing in their full form. Rather, Cruz focuses on their patterns, textures, and minute details. A close-up painting of a dress’ armhole centers the interaction of circles and pinstripes; collages meld cut-ups of the fabrics with gestural strokes and blotches.

A series of abstract, mixed media works contain imprints of the actual cloths, which Cruz transferred through a print-like technique. Patterns of lace and crochet fabric crawl or float among thick, dark paint strokes. Here, the fabrics no longer appear in vivid detail – instead, they are almost ghostlike, haunting the canvases.

Fractured Fabric ultimately celebrates the scars of the fabrics – their holes, frays and blotches. Cruz sees in them a kind of beauty: traces of her family’s endurance and care, with all their vulnerabilities.

– Nicole Soriano

Painted dresses, magnified from a certain spot and rendered in detail, call for a formalist mode of interpretation. In the hands of Marina Cruz (b. 1981), they undergo a process of sublime composition to produce an effect like minimalist abstraction. The patterns found in each textile - whether checkered, dotted, lace-patterned, or pinstriped - recall the works of abstractionists who focused on to the interaction between colors and shapes. The folds and creases of each dress create a particular kind of texture, similar to the mannered strokes and painterly surfaces perpetuated by formalists. Unexpected details such as threadbare hems or blotchy stains add further vitality to the overall composition, while buttons, holes, tears, and armies of seams complete the story.

The clothes that Cruz paints are part of a deeper fabric of remembering forgotten family narratives: her chance encounter with a heap of family heirlooms and discovering the small dresses that her mother and her mother’s twin sister wore as children, which left a lasting impression on her. The damaged, brittle condition of the tiny dresses opened a remarkable world from the past able to be codified through such objects. From then on, Cruz began to unearth more than a hundred dresses made by her grandmother for her mother and aunt. She proceeded to paint them, embroider them, cast them in resin, and use them in installations and videos for exhibitions. For her, they served as a family archive, through which the unspoken lives and histories of an earlier generation were embedded.

Through these paintings, Marina Cruz has continually explored an essential trait found within the region: the valued continuum that proceeds from close family ties among succeeding generations. Through her art, she is able to transpose the activity of one generation to the next: her grandmother’s dress- making, her mother’s fittings, and her own activity of painting. This closed cycle of familial undertakings, carefully pieced together and sympathetically presented by Cruz, has become rare in a world that has developed the propensity to reach outward rather than inward, due to the globalizing technologies.