Jorge K. Cruz (b.1995) was born and grew up in the coastal city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, before emigrating to New York City at the age of 17. This year, he relocated to Margate, UK, for the Tracey Emin Artist Residency, where he is currently based. Self-taught as an artist, Cruz made an early decision to dedicate his path to painting, which he approaches as an intuitive and experimental action. The artist’s work is inflected with this sense of flux between the worlds of past and present, between a saturated familiarity and the starkness of the present moment, channelled into the romantic, nostalgic, expressive, and even conflicting capacities of painting as a medium. As his swirling imagery contorts into abstraction, Cruz demonstrates a visceral use of the medium to reflect upon those truths that wind beneath everyday life. In his own words: “I have found that simplicity can be a helpful partner when dealing with complicated subjects.”