Almost everything is a question of time. How important time is and how little we respect it! Always running, without distinguishing between what is urgent and what is important. In art, time is essential so that artists can develop their lines of research, can make tests, make mistakes and find solutions. How gratifying and exciting it is to visit an exhibition of an artist whose work you have followed practically since its beginnings and with whom you occasionally have the opportunity to share projects and talks, and see how, suddenly, everything fits together, how early and current works are related and show coherence, how their discourse achieves a point of solidity.
This is the experience I had these days at CA2M, the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo in Madrid when visiting the exhibition Panal, by Francesc Ruiz, which includes works made by the artist between 1997 and the present. Francesc Ruiz began in the 90s with expanded comics, detailed drawings in which a multitude of urban scenes took place in which groups appeared who lived the city with different levels of codification (a thousand and one different situations in El Corte Inglés, cruising in Montjuic or hospital, educational and leisure uses with architectures made of bodies and not buildings in the Zona Alta of Barcelona). From expanded comics attached to the walls of exhibition halls to putting emphasis on distribution there was a step, with kiosks in Barcelona, but also wherever exhibitions and residencies took him: Venice, Cairo, and comic shops linked to very specific consumption modalities or communities (Yaoi, gays).
Personal, social, sexual, urban and dissident identities are the leitmotiv of Francesc Ruiz’s work. The Panal exhibition culminates (literally) with a large installation (large in size and large in significance): Three Streets, Three Colours, which becomes a point of arrival and a step further in the artist’s work. The most direct antecedent is BCN Eye Trip (2008), a video installation in which the city was reduced to its logos. Now, in the great atrium of CA2M, Ruiz creates a vertical, global, chaotic city, full of colour and excess, which confronts us with the three levels of use and distribution in our global and digitalised world: the blue of Lycamobile, that is, of telecommunications and the incorporation of migrants into new cities; the yellow of Uber and the post office, that is, of logistics and messaging; and finally, at the highest level, the red of online adult entertainment. And so, in 20 years, the universe of Francesc Ruiz has taken us from drawings of multiple and simultaneous kaleidoscopic micro-scenes to immerse us in this great virtual city, delocalized, standardized and deregulated.
Francesc Ruiz, Three Streets, Three Colours, 2020
CA2M, Madrid
Photo: Sue Ponce Gómez
[Article published in Bonart 2020]
