TheTemple

Jorge da Cruz (b. 1974)
The Temple, 2023
Charcoal and red pastel on canvas (diptych), 200 × 200 cm
© k37 studio, Bethanien Art Center, Berlin

The Temple
Text by Jorge da Cruz

The Temple is a reflection on time, decay, and the strange endurance of human ambition. With this diptych, I wanted to explore what’s left behind—what survives, and what it means when the things we build begin to fall apart. The ruins at the center of the drawing are fractured and heavy, stripped of purpose but still loaded with presence. For me, they’re not just stones or remnants—they’re markers of effort, of lives once lived, of hands and minds that tried to create something lasting.

The entire piece is built in charcoal, with its weight, its silence, its refusal to gloss over detail. But cutting through the monochrome, I added sharp lines in red pastel. That red isn’t just decorative—it breaks the stillness. It cuts through the ruin like a current, something alive. For me, those red lines echo the floor plans of cathedrals, or the structural logic behind sacred architecture—our human need to create order, to give form to meaning, even in the face of collapse.

That contrast—between the ruins and the red—is important. It holds the tension between two forces: the drive to build, and the certainty that time will undo it. The red carries vitality, but also futility. It points to what we reach for and what we can't hold onto.

There are faint human figures in this work too—barely visible, almost absorbed into the landscape. That’s something new for me. These figures aren’t portraits; they’re traces. Ghosts, maybe. Presences that don’t fully reveal themselves, but linger. They’re there to suggest memory, and how quickly it can fade. They’re about what’s remembered—and what isn’t.

I didn’t want to romanticize ruins here. I wanted to face them. They aren’t symbols of beauty or nostalgia—they’re evidence. Of collapse. Of time. But they’re not dead either. Those red lines keep them moving. They pulse through the stone like veins. Even in their brokenness, these spaces carry something forward—something that still shapes us.

The Temple is really about cycles. Creation and destruction. Presence and absence. I’m not asking what lasts forever—because nothing does. I’m asking what gets left behind, and what we do with it. Sometimes it’s just a line, or a crack, or a whisper of someone who was once there. And sometimes, that’s enough.

JC