Artist: Jorge K. Cruz

Hurst Contemporary presents Just to Keep You Satisfied, Jorge K. Cruz’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. In this series of watercolour and oil paintings, Cruz interrogates the Flemish still life tradition, depicting writhing beasts and vanitas displays, with a fresh brutal immediacy.

Cruz is interested in where our boundaries lie between hunger and consumption, disgust and desire, and destruction and beauty. Through free-flowing, gestural and rhythmic strokes of paint, Cruz uses the tradition of pronkstillevens and jachtstillevens, to consider these human points of tension that linger underneath the genres’ surfaces.

Back in September 2023, Cruz began obsessively making studies of game still lifes by Flemish Baroque painter Paul de Vos, while at Tracey Emin Artist Residency in Margate. Now based in New York, Cruz continued his studies, working from black and white photocopies of paintings of the same genre by Frans Synders, Peter Paul Rubens, and Jan Fyt, making repeated studies in rapid brushstrokes, trying to uncover the brutal essence behind these works.

As Cruz’s process evolved into his own full body of work, he kept returning to the idea of deconstruction. Beeldenstorm (2025)—a title referencing the 16th-century wave of iconoclasm in the Netherlands—embodies this concept. Across the exhibition, this spirit of upheaval extends to the genre itself, seen in the scale of the works, the choice of watercolour, and the expressive brushwork. ‘It’s like I’m digging through the ugly, trying to reach the beauty,’ Cruz says, ‘it’s how I perceive life, I always have to find the beauty within certain things’.

In the tradition of Frans Synders, Cruz’s still lifes are not strictly nature mortes; rather, the dead animals serve as intentional contrasts to the animate creatures, drawing a line between life and death. This line of mortality is also a line of morality—one that Cruz explores through the symbolic weight we place on flesh. In still life painting, flesh has long been tied to Christian ideas of sin and indulgence. The Dutch word ‘vogeler,’ meaning to catch birds, carried a double meaning in these Flemish game still lifes, playfully alluding to this moral transgression.

Across Just to Keep You Satisfied, Cruz returns to the question of satiation—what drives hunger, and what, if anything, can truly satisfy it? His works wrestle with appetite in all its forms, from the visceral to the symbolic, probing the uneasy tensions within our human nature.

About Jorge K. Cruz

Born in 1995 in the coastal city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, Jorge K. Cruz emigrated to New York City at 17. He later relocated to Margate for the Tracey Emin Artist Residency (2023–2024) before returning to New York, where he is now based. In 2023, he was featured in Breakthrough, a group exhibition at James Fuentes Gallery (October 21–November 22).