스킵네비게이션

Born 1971 in Barcelona, Spain

Lives in Barcelona

Francesc RUIZ, A Room of One’s Own Lily Indie Press, Site specific installation, variable dimension

For the last twenty years, Francesc RUIZ has consistently developed and worked on projects that involve cartoons and comic strip cultures. It is not the traditional comic that serves a purpose of pure entertainment; RUIZ recognizes the comic book as aesthetic, structural, and intellectual substrate to look at and question the society and politics that surrounds him. RUIZ mirrors reality and reflects on sexuality, sexual fetishes, gender, identity, and LGTBIQ+ issues. Nothing is hidden, all sexual preferences are out in the open and displayed. Presenting his works as installations, comics, printed matter, and bookstores, RUIZ constantly looks for alternative ways of distributing the comics to disrupt regular systems. The awakening of historical sexual liberation movements can be found everywhere in his work, in which he generates a mash-up of genres, cultures, and historical references—from the Tijuana Bibles (porn parodies in comic format from 1930s to 60s) to Catecismos do Brasil (porn mini-comics from 1950s to 80s), from Italian Fumetti Erotici(erotic comicsfrom the mid-1960s to the 80s) to Japanese Yaoi (Boys Love manga genre created in the 1970s).

In 2010, RUIZ constructed a bookshop called Gasworks Yaoi at the exhibition space Gasworks in London. There he displayed work relating to the feminine subculture ofYaoi, which is a Japanese manga genre that depicts male to male romance and sex, all produced and consumed by women. Another example is RUIZ’s parasite comic bookstore installation in an already existing bookstore at the Momentum Biennial in Moss, Norway, in 2019. At House of Fun, RUIZ presented the subculture of alternative Hentai and explored radical sexual fetishes mainly focused on the male gaze, and made them available to the viewers. The alternative bookstore became a safe space to explore and share new ideas, sexual desires, and tested the limits of representation. Alternative distribution methods—by street venders, newsstands, hand-to-hand circulation—of printed matters are essential to RUIZ, because they are effective ways to share stories, make people aware of the city, and point to an alternative to main street consumerism. RUIZ challenges the existing architectural structures and constantly addresses individual, political, social, urban, and sexual norms. RUIZ creates spaces for subculture encounters where freedom of speech can be exercised, and where gender, sexuality, and identity can be shared and let loose.