|
Between the places in which daily living occurs are the intermediary
spaces of fantasy, play, pleasure and desire. Evocative of the nocturnal, Alan Ruiz’s installations offer brief and
elusive moments of the ecstasy of escaping the body. His work often presents darkness as the surface on which light,
pulsating and unstable, both constitutes and negates form and its representation. This ecstatic quality of Ruiz’s
work takes on an expanded meaning for his practice in which bounded notions of reality and its perception, image and object,
spectator and representation, begin to disintegrate. Testing the limits of pictorial representation and the handmade, Ruiz
draws on the high modernist canon of abstract painting by means of the digital, corrupting it while at the same time reclaiming
it for a post-medium age. Harnessing multiple media, Ruiz renders the idea of the image as
interval, oscillating it between the real and the virtual. Through the use of projections, mirrors, and digitally generated
spaces, Ruiz’s installations have a semblance of being based in a spatially coherent reality. Yet the mirroring
and repetition of representational units create a fractal space that is continually both dividing and multiplying itself,
collapsing any boundary between the work and its surrounding space, between the viewer and object. Here, in the shift from
mimetic reproduction to infinite (auto)replication, the status of the image takes on a new anxiety, where every image has
the potential to become an unstable object. Neither constituting the reality in which we live
nor completely divorcing the spectator from everyday experience, the image is thus always a displaced space. In Ruiz’s
practice, space itself becomes the medium through which the image is both generated and taken apart. Deconstructing
and then mutating the devices in which images and spectatorship have historically been ordered, particularly through perspective
and the grid, Ruiz destabilizes any notion of an autonomous work and a unified, punctual viewing subject as the history of
modernism has insisted upon. Looking at his work is disorienting and often vertiginous, as our understanding of the
image emerges as inseparable from the built environment. And yet, we look. We look because it is precisely in looking
and being looked at, in seeing and being seen that there remains any chance of redeeming our own subjectivity. What
we find in looking at the work is a pleasure in the act of looking itself. At the
core of Ruiz’s work, then, is a deep ambivalence to modernist notions of medium specificity, the autonomous art object
and spectator. His is an expansive practice in which medium is always mobile, and where meaning is located precisely
in this movement. Escaping any kind of fixed signification, his work provides the viewer with an ever-unfolding chain
of meaning, opening up the possibility of sensory pleasure in this very instability. Suspending the real, but yet never
fully offering the virtual as a solution, or even as a substitution, Ruiz circumvents any stable perception of the object
and instead places the work in the infinite regress of movement between the multiple registers of affective experience. This
is where the image resides in Ruiz’s work, in the interval between blindness perception, in the gap between a blink
and a pulse. Joy Jeehye Kim 2009
|
