Francesc Ruiz’s work investigates narrative models based on comic language, popular culture idioms and their distribution in public formats such as books, billboards, advertising, magazines and the internet. Ruiz creates a personal visual language by generating a juxtaposition of images and texts in deliberated sequences in order to produce fantastic/fantasmagoric social maps of action. Fascinated by urban sub-cultures, Ruiz reflects on how collective and individual subjectivities are constructed by their local contexts, gender or class. Ruiz focuses on the space where subjects inhabit their everyday life and therefore often starts from autobiographical experience. His drawings, photographs, printed materials and installations explore aspects of the social experience and of a local unconscious.
For the Bulletin Board, Francesc Ruiz has produced Coverage, which resembles a collage of different magazines covers that are drawn and designed by the artist. Ordered intentionally, the covers construct a narrative based on the following categories:
Journals of teens and preteens.
Sports magazines and magazines for men.
Women’s magazines
Architecture and interior design magazines.
The composition Coverage questions how family constructs directly correlate with the definition of home and its representation in the public sphere. To do so, Ruiz’s Coverage creates a set of associations with no evident relation. The first row with architecture and interior design magazines depict dilapidated or demolished homes and is followed by rows showing women, men and adolescents in a dialogue that reveals their inner thoughts, fears, and distress.
As in other works such as Downtown (2006) or Comic Kiosk Brick (2008), Ruiz’s covers create a space between the comic and press imagery. Aiming to activate the space of the bulletin board, Ruiz has included text balloons, which allow the characters on the covers of magazines to comment on their own representation. This mirror effect questions established systems of representation by forcing associations and activating the images’ latent ideologies and psychologies.
About the Artist
Francesc Ruiz (Barcelona, 1971) lives and works in Barcelona.
Ruiz has exhibited his work in solo shows internationally, including in CIC Cairo (Cairo), Gassworks (London), Galería Estrany De La Mota (Barcelona), Maribel López Gallery (Berlin) and Museo Nacional Reina Sofía (Madrid). He has also shown in group exhibitions such as Before Everything at CA2M (Madrid); The Graphic Unconscious at Philagrafika (Philadelphia). Old News 4 at Midway Contemporary Art (Minneapolis); or Existencias at Musac (Léon).
The Bulletin Board
The Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College is the third venue to host Matthew Higgs’s (Curator and Director of White Columns) bulletin board project. CCS and Higgs collaborated to begin a bulletin board program at Bard in the fall of 2007 with the understanding that the graduate students at CCS would curate it. The bulletin board is an enclosed glass case divided into three panes by aluminum bars.
