Lionel Cruet

Provenance: Courtesy of the Artist

I create large-scale audio and visual installations, experimental digital prints, sound arrangements in space and videos to recreate spaces, memories, and experiences using imagery of natural spaces as a metaphor to understand the complex and interconnected realities we all live. The sources that generate the artworks are mostly in a digital form, archival material, and research based that serve to create the installations itself. Images of obscure natural spaces and elements that define our intimate relationship to spaces, storage containers, sounds, voices and songs of proclamations in the void, become the aesthetics of the work. Through my artworks and practice I am constantly confronting geopolitical issues, states de facto, economics, the act of speculation and testimonials about the relations that we create to spaces and natural environments; always underlining a conceptual framework that comes from my experiences as a Caribbean colonial and post colonial being as it is dialogue with the rest of the world.

Lionel Cruet born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, lives and works in New York City and San Juan. Cruet received a Bachelor in Fine Arts from La Escuela de Artes Plásticas en Puerto Rico and a Master in Fine Arts from CUNY – The City College of New York, and Masters in Education from College of Saint Rose; was the recipient of the Juan Downey Audiovisual Award in 2013 at the 11th Media Arts Biennale at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, Chile. Cruet uses multiple mediums including experimental digital printing processes, performance, and audiovisual installations to confront issues that concern economics, geopolitics, and technology.

Cruet’s artworks have been included in exhibitions at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2017); Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse (2017); Museo del Barrio, New York (2013), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (2013); and Universidad de Sagrado Corazón, Puerto Rico (2014); and a solo exhibition at the Bronx River Art Center (2015) and have been reviewed Made in Mind Magazine, designboom, Daily Serving California College of the Arts, and Latinx Spaces. Cruet works with New York City Department of Education, as well as multiple nonprofits that promote art and aesthetic education for immigrant youth.