Cesar Cueva

GROUP EXHIBITION

SEVENMARKS GALLERY

7th December - 1st February 2025

UNBALANCED

A feeling of unease, a visual hurdle, a tipping point. Contributing to many monumental events and great artworks, it is a physical and visual element that holds potency. Challenging comfort and known order, we ask the featured artists to explore the parameters of balance and convey understanding through their chosen material. 

Artists | Cesar Cueva, Chick Butcher, Cinnamon Lee, Cobi Cockburn, Gabrielle Adamik, Mat Heaney, Mikey Freedom, Phil Spelman & Scott Chaseling

CROSSING PATHS (SECTION C-C)

by Cesar Cueva

Crossing Paths (Section C–C) was created for the group exhibition Unbalanced. The title plays on the photograph as a slice through a mineral specimen, but also nods to my training in architectural drafting, where section cuts reveal what is usually hidden. This double reading mirrors the exhibition’s theme balance as something fragile, provisional, and shaped by unseen forces beneath the surface.

This work continues a thread in my practice that began with a chance encounter with a gem miner. He spoke about inclusions, foreign matter embedded within crystalline growth, which are often treated as faults, reasons to discard a stone. I see them differently. Inclusions scatter light, shift colour, and create unique patterning; they are what make each crystal singular. What appears to be a flaw is also what gives it character and resonance.

For me, inclusions are not just geological facts but metaphors: reminders that our own fractures, interruptions, and entanglements are what give us depth. They speak to difference as value, to the way disruption can become part of a greater whole. In this sense, inclusions point toward inclusivity, the idea that it is precisely what doesn’t “fit” neatly that makes something, or someone, extraordinary.

In Crossing Paths (Section C–C), crystalline architectures are translated into fractured grids of colour and pattern that gesture to human inter-connectedness. The work asks whether art can help us not only endure imbalance, but recognise beauty within it, to see instability, fracture, and inclusion as conditions for connection rather than collapse.

Within my broader practice, this piece sits between Elemento, which magnified crystalline interiors, and Bloom Break, which expands into archetypes of psyche. Together, they form a language of fracture and pattern that seeks to re-frame what is fragile or unsettled as vital, generative, and shared.