Francesc Ruiz

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Through drawings with unfinished storylines, Francesc Ruiz creates credible representations of forms of social urbanism, translated into standardised forms of conduct that societies have developed or tend to develop in the numerous spaces of public coexistence that the city generates, both in real life and in the imaginary iconography of the world of print. With these drawings, which he often converts into mural pieces on a monumental scale, he weaves stories that are possible, fictionalised, treated with black humour, that eventually allow a glimpse of conflicts that we can find in any construction of urban collectivity.

The Funhouse is an installation that simulates a hall of distorting mirrors similar to those that we find in funfairs. Unfolding in its interior is an ambiguous representation of characters undergoing a collective catharsis, which would be like the reflections of the spectators in the exhibition hall itself. Through this artistic drawing, digitally manipulated and augmented to a life-size scale, the artist places us before an existential space jammed with a series of uncontrolled actions by the protagonists trapped inside a parodic reverberation of mirrors that accentuates the drift of the scene. In this work the artist makes an implicit reference to the behavioural receptivity at the heart of contemporary art, taking the museum itself into a state of alienation where director, visitors and all that it contains, charge into a game of deformed languages and deceitful realities.

The installation Les portes (Lleida) proposes another form of urban meta-narrative. Through a very broad archive of photographs of facades of buildings in Lleida, the artist makes up covers of publications that work like small architectures by permitting access to the same number of interiors of houses in the same city, through images taken from property sales and rental websites. Francesc Ruíz transfers, thus, the spectator to a handmade maquette of the city that each can visit and manage, creating their own route, putting into practice a kind of random voyeurism through the interior of hundreds of home scenarios that show the close (and simultaneously inevitable) particularities that arise in a single collectivity to which they belong. An apparently casual act, like someone browsing a record or comics shop and thumbing through the contents, or, in this case, the remains of a vulnerable property market pushed with impunity into a nosedive by the recent economic and speculative situation. These private spaces in the city, self-exhibited in a fragile fashion, are disturbing because of the signs they incorporate of a growing phenomenon of public depredation.

Teresa Blanch