dog

In Dog, Jorge Da Cruz creates a large-scale charcoal drawing—240 × 160 cm, made up of sixteen joined sheets—that holds space for stillness, tension, and the subtle shifts in how we experience the world. It’s a landscape suspended between opposites: motion and stillness, clarity and ambiguity, sight and sound. The drawing plays with delay—the kind you feel when you see lightning before you hear thunder. That in-between moment becomes the heart of the work.

At the center of the composition, a mountain rises—solid, immobile, unshaken. It grounds everything around it. Above, the sky is anything but still. Clouds roll and churn, drawn with sweeping strokes of charcoal that seem to pulse with energy. The contrast is striking: the mountain feels eternal, the sky unsettled, full of something about to break. The mountain isn’t just part of the landscape—it carries a symbolic weight. It becomes a presence, something enduring and quiet, like a held breath.

The title, Dog, adds another layer—simple, but loaded. It’s “God” in reverse. Not explained, just placed. A small twist that opens the door to big questions. It hints at duality—above and below, divine and everyday, presence and absence. Like the mountain, the title stays steady, but it’s charged with meaning.

Charcoal is key to the atmosphere here. Its range—from soft greys to deep blacks—lets Da Cruz shape both weight and air, surface and space. The storm doesn’t explode; it hangs. Everything in the drawing feels caught in a moment before something happens. There’s no spectacle, no resolution—just the tension of what’s about to come. The air feels thick. Quiet, but full.

Dog is about thresholds—about the space just before change, when everything is still forming. It asks for stillness. It invites you to pause, to sit in that moment between perception and meaning, between knowing and not knowing. It’s a work that speaks softly, but stays with you. Not because it shows everything—but because of what it holds back.