•one step before happiness - l charcoal on paper | 160x120 l © k37 studio Berlin 2019
Jorge Da Cruz (b. 1974)
One Step Before Happiness (series), 2024
Charcoal on paper, multiple works (various sizes and compositions)
One Step Before Happiness serie
Text by Berna Valada
One Step Before Happiness
In One Step Before Happiness, Jorge Da Cruz turns to the mountain—not merely as a feature of terrain, but as a vessel of meaning. For millennia, mountains have been regarded as sacred thresholds, places where earth touched the divine. They embodied endurance and grandeur, forming a symbolic bridge between human life and what lay beyond it. In these drawings, that symbolic charge has shifted. The mountain no longer radiates transcendence; it appears worn, stripped of aura, and recast as a challenge to overcome rather than a site to revere.
These imagined landscapes speak not of presence, but of its fading. If climbers appear, they do not ascend in search of communion; they climb from restlessness, drive, or defiance. The mountain becomes a goal—a metric of achievement. The land, in turn, carries the marks of that exchange: deep trails etched by repetition, disrupted ecologies, and a quiet erosion of meaning. The works register this shift without declaring it; they show how conquest can replace reverence, and how that substitution changes both the land and our perception of it.
Charcoal—raw, dry, elemental—is central to the series’ language. It invites building and erasure, weight and air, grain and silence. Da Cruz uses it to conjure terrains that do not shine so much as loom. Edges soften into memory; peaks hold themselves back. The drawings refuse spectacle. Instead, they ask us to inhabit gradations of dark and light, to feel the pull of mass without the promise of revelation. Charcoal’s dust becomes a kind of weather—settling on surfaces, filling crevices, turning light into haze—so that form appears as if recovered rather than asserted.
The work takes shape as a group of charcoal drawings in different sizes. This variation in scale is not incidental; it guides how we move through the series and what we notice. Larger works open onto distance, gathering horizon lines and atmospheric breadth; smaller works pull us close, insisting on surface, touch, and the micro-geographies of cracks, grooves, and shadowed grain. As the eye travels between scales, the image itself seems to transform: what begins as landscape shifts into texture; what reads as symbol turns tactile. The mountain does not disappear—it changes register. Vastness becomes intimacy; meaning becomes matter.
Yet One Step Before Happiness resists nostalgia. It does not mourn a lost world of myth, nor does it propose a return to it. Instead, it lingers at the edge, in the charged interval before something changes. Each drawing feels like a held breath, a pause saturated with tension and potential. The title keeps the balance unstable: is this one step before happiness, or one step before collapse? The work does not decide; it inhabits the interval. That undecidability is not a weakness but a method—an insistence that perception itself is a threshold, and that our responsibilities to the world begin there.
What remains is a quiet invitation to look more closely. Even without their myths, mountains retain force. They ask for attention, humility, and responsibility. They remind us of the distance between what we once believed and what we now practice—and of the fragile, unfinished bond that still binds reverence to care. In Da Cruz’s hands, charcoal becomes a tool for thinking with matter: how meaning accumulates, how it erodes, and how, even in erosion, something persists.
These drawings do not offer solutions. They offer a stance: to meet the mountain without the promise of transcendence, and to keep looking anyway. To accept that the land records our choices. To recognize that the interval before change—the threshold where we are held—is where perception, and perhaps accountability, begins. In that sense, One Step Before Happiness is less a declaration than a proposition: that the space between reverence and responsibility is still open, and that how we see will shape how we live with what stands before us. BV
one step before happiness l landscape the calling - l charcoal on paper | 140x160cm l © k37 studio, Berlin 2018
Valley•one step before happiness l landscape the calling - l charcoal on paper | 180x140 l © k37 studio Berlin 2019
Jorge daCruz-one step before happiness l landscape the calling2- l charcoal on paper | 140x160cm l © k37 studio, bethanien Berlin 2018
Jorge daCruz - One step before happiness | the world creation l charcoal on paper, 2018 | 300x125 cm l © k37 studio, bethanien Berlin, (Ventura Collection, Kassel)
One step before happiness | the cave l charcoal on paper, 2018 | 280x80cm l © k37 studio, bethanien Berlin
