Niles Cruz

Niles Cruz is a mid-career contemporary artist who works in a studio in his townhouse located in Brooklyns Park Slope. Self-taught as an artist, he has developed an idiosyncratic but highly successful method to create one-of-a-kind artworks. He uses plastic transparencies, to which he applies various media: magic marker, oil stick, and acrylics. He then reprints the imagery and collages it to create a final work of art. He also draws on paper that he scans in order to print on transparencies. These are then pieced together to create a finished image. Each individual square, or cell as Cruz calls them, is aligned with other plastic cells, often identical to the first but variously rotated or reversed to create patterns of mind-boggling complexity. Cruzs general strategy is to build complexity through the careful arrangement of the heavily marked transparencies, which generate a mandalalike intricacy. At the same time, Cruz is clearly entranced by color; his work, printed on a simple home computer printer, shows marvelous detail and a brilliant sense of composition. JONATHAN GOODMAN

The current body of work, begun in late 2005, is comprised of mixed media pieces that begin as drawings, which are scanned, printed onto transpar...

Past and current exhibitions include. The Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Ats (MOCHA); The Brooklyn Museum; The Museo Del Barrio, NYC; The Allen Gallery Annex, NYC. The Hudson River Museum, NYC. The New Art Gallery, NYC.; Waterside Arts, Stamford,Conn.;,