Jorge da Cruz

Objects and Moons — Far Side of the Moon — Southern Hemisphere, 2019

Charcoal on paper

Text by noT

Objects and Moons — Far Side of the Moon — Southern Hemisphere is a series of six charcoal drawings that approaches the Moon through absence rather than direct observation.

The works do not depict a visible landscape. They respond to a part of the Moon that remains permanently turned away from Earth — a place defined by distance, fragmentation, and incomplete knowledge.

The far side of the Moon is not dark. It receives the same light as the near side, but remains hidden because of synchronous rotation. Over millions of years, Earth’s gravitational pull slowed the Moon’s rotation until it matched its orbit, keeping one face directed toward us and withholding the other. Even with libration, the slight oscillation that allows partial shifts in perspective, the far side can never be seen from Earth as a whole.

This condition of permanent invisibility is central to the series.

Each drawing is constructed as a fragment, assembled rather than observed. Seams, interruptions, shifts in tone, and changes in surface remain visible. The circular form suggests completeness, but the internal breaks resist resolution. The Moon appears not as a single stable object, but as something reconstructed from distance, data, imagination, and absence.

In 1959, the Luna 3 mission transmitted the first images of the far side, revealing a rough, heavily cratered surface, very different from the familiar volcanic plains of the near side. That moment created a rupture between expectation and revelation. Something long imagined became visible, but only through mediation, transmission, and delay.

This tension runs through the drawings. Scientific knowledge and imagination meet here, not to possess the Moon completely, but to preserve its distance.

Charcoal allows that distance to remain unstable. It creates surfaces that feel mapped and uncertain at the same time. Blackness, dust, pressure, and erasure become ways of approaching something that cannot be fully reached.

Objects and Moons functions less as a single image than as a constellation. Together, the drawings orbit a shared absence, holding space for what cannot be completely seen, mapped, or owned.