STATEMENTFor about a decade I have been developing visual languages based largely on drawing and formal resources typical of fields such as architecture, textbook illustration, heraldry, political propaganda or history painting. A number of recurring themes appear throughout my work: the contradictions between theory and practice, the crucial influence of abstract ideas on concrete processes of social transformation, the relations of power with the historical past and how it is reinterpreted to legitimize the status quo in the present.I like to think of my work as handmade replicas of cultural products from speculative futures or alternate timelines. Images, objects and texts are used to create fictional socio-political scenarios, ranging from the plausible to the absurd, situated somewhere between the Utopian and the dystopian. Although the imagined worlds are not necessarily more desirable than the one we live in, in one way or another they all question historical determinism and other ideological dogmas of our time. Through distorting lenses of various colours and thicknesses, we contemplate disturbing versions of our own reality, in which the mechanisms that keep things running, usually hidden under layers of culture and civilization, are laid bare. SPANISH VERSION
Time-Travel Machine Drawings. Interview with Francesc Ruiz. A*DESK, 2022 (SP/CAT/EN) |
