STATEMENT

Daniel Ruanova and painting as an event

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Daniel Ruanova's work is composed of a successive series of perfect time bombs, detonators that freeze the overwhelming speed of reality, in order to appreciate the chaotic nature of the contemporary spectacle, an enveloping mirage where information runs through our veins and is deposited in the colon, to produce spasms and convulsions that paralyze and subdue us, to warn us that, no matter how unusual reality is, we must not stop smiling and applauding in the midst of indignation.

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Ruanova warns us that the smile of someone who demands that we be happy is a false, malignant, cruel, perverse smile, which reduces everything to a slogan, a virulent catchphrase or a lapidary word that is transmitted by that confusing ivy woven by the media. And to do so, he turns painting into an event, an event in which the gestures of plastic language converge with the clarity of articulation that we see in advertising language. Ruanova collides these two languages, confronts them and activates them so that the visual result is a kind of encrypted code (painting as CAPTCHA) as well as a living manifesto that can explode at any moment, and that reminds us of that powerful agency that we humans have to say “Fuck You” to the chaotic order of things.

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Situated in the epidermis of the exchange of visual, linguistic, political and economic signs of the Neoliberal time, the border for Daniel Ruanova has been alternately a microscope and a telescope to recognize the vicissitudes of the nervous world in which we live, the original interzone from where the most imposing impulses of the globalized world have been deployed, Tijuana as the training camp for resistance and the poetics of a contemporary plastic art that always demands its vitality, through explosive pictorial acts, half aesthetic biography (the presence of neon and sparks and splices on black backgrounds, the glittering typography that fights for its (in)visibility) half critical apparatus around the hysterical efficiency of late capitalism, to shout to reality, through lightning and flashes, the urgent warning that if the world is fading, we will not go away silently.

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Alejandro Espinoza Galindo