One Step Before Happiness
In this series, Jorge Da Cruz turns to the mountain as a recurring form—once revered as sacred, now bearing the traces of exile, ambition, and decline. One Step Before Happiness reflects on the transformation of landscapes once associated with divinity. The mountains, which in ancient mythology connected earth and sky, now stand as silent witnesses to a world distanced from transcendence.
Charcoal becomes the ideal medium for this vision: dry, granular, elemental. Through it, Da Cruz constructs vast, desolate terrains. The peaks no longer radiate glory; they loom, marked by absence. Their outlines suggest former grandeur but are softened by erosion, memory, and silence. These are not heroic summits to be conquered, but spaces heavy with meaning—echoes of a lost order.
In this imagined landscape, nature no longer speaks the language of the gods. The climbers who ascend these heights—modern figures of restlessness and defiance—do not seek communion but conquest. The ascent becomes a gesture of hubris, disconnected from the reverence that once shaped our relationship to the land. The mountains, in turn, bear the scars of this shift: weathered trails, disrupted ecologies, a quiet erosion of meaning.
Yet Da Cruz’s work resists nostalgia. The series does not mourn what is lost, but lingers in the space just before transformation. There is still tension—still time. Each drawing is a pause, a threshold: one step before happiness, or perhaps one step before collapse. The title itself holds that ambiguity.
What remains is a call to perception. The mountains, even stripped of myth, retain their force. They demand attention—not only as forms in space, but as symbols of the distance between what we once believed and what we now inhabit. Through this visual language, Da Cruz invites reflection on our place within the landscape, and on the fragile, unfinished bond between reverence and responsibility.
