ESTEBAN RUIZ Paris. Abril 1999

After ten years of hard work in the representation of images, believes and Epiphanies of primitive religions, and from a long journey in the East (India and Nepal) and South America, in which I become imbued with its culture and its experiences, I drew an important change in the conceptual and iconological basis of my work.
Those materials and works contain a clear aesthetics even in its conceptual aspect, since the most overwhelming of my feelings, my experiences and my fears are reflected on them. Love, sex, life, death,what is holy, what is profane within what is holy, the deep study of thinkers and literary characters who have guided my course throughout the narrow path of life.. Without them, my humanistic and intellectual perceptions would have been lost or would have followed a different course.
Entring straight and without any fears in the analysis and interpretation of those characters, I address myself _ through the intensive work of my workshop- to the use of a qualitatively mystic language that border on madness by the minute, of a maturity based on my culture reins, those of my andalusian land which have been able to interpretate spontaneously those knowledges up to the passions paroxysm refected on life.

Esteban Ruiz an the mysticism

Some where at an altitude of 1000 metres, between Jaén and Granada, a little village, Valdepeñas de Jaén. It is here where Esteban Ruiz works, in a different Andalusia, free from the horders of tourists,a mountainous Andalusia, cold but warm, an almost Castilian Andalusia, like a far dream, hidden behind Sierra Nevada, the mythical Granada, symbol of the Arabian- Andalusian civilization.
From his workshop, Esteban Ruiz comtemplates those rhythmical mountains in the olive groves with their mathematic rigor under an immaculate sky. Far away, some spots of snow placed as if they were dotted by the hand of a heavenly painter.
Esteban Ruiz knows every single hidden place of this magnificent and austere countryside: prehistoric caves, a Morish castle in ruins symbol of past fights, the cave where a saint sheltered ( this region is conducive to mysticism). During his morning walks, before starting to work, he picks up polish stone axes, pieces of arabic ceramic etc...those objects that join him to the pass and that illustrate what he told me one day: “In the prehistoric period, the men who were contemplating the drawing of a comb did underestand that it was representating an animal...” I think all that explains Esteban Ruiz’s art, linked to our more primitive past, the furthest, with the cromlech, its attachement to the symbol, the ogival arch,. memory of great myths of our western civilization, the Minotaur, Don Juan, evocation of great literary plays, Dante, evocation of essential mysteries, , death, live, love, motherhood. The elegance and the rigor in the countryside are found in his work.Those blue dots, which are characteristic of some of his pieces of cloth, bring to mind the olive groves relentless alignment. Those orange marks projected on the still fresh piece of cloth seem to come straight from the injuries of the Andalusian land.
Through his paintings, Esteban Ruiz invetes us to meet again in ourselves the primitive man who knows how to feel and see things ,objects, life free from the deformed perspective of educatiom and culture. He points to our deeper aspect, the one that is really hidden, but at the same time, he asks for our erudition in order to read his paintings. His art invites us to develop our sensitivity and our intelligence at the same time.
Esteban’s Ruiz main characteristic is the unity, the homogeneity, the balance, the elegance, the sensitivity and the violence controlled by a complete mastery of his art which has been acqired from his more than 400 pictures. It is necessary to see him painting, like a possessed demiurgo but controlling his possession at he same time, the material on the floor, like a body which is offered to his deepest wishes, projecting the linseed oil violently in order to provoque the marks which became a perfect calligraphy in no time. He feels comfortable and he dominates every single format, every way of expression , every genre. Drawing a minuscule character in a restaurant card or having fun to treat one of his friends, he developes a pin- up worthy of Playboy in a piece of craft paper. Esteban Ruiz is an artist that makes us to travel to our far origins by expressing our more basic questions. His art, spitting image of his native land, this eternal Andalusia that after so many civilizations and so many invations has decanted all his messages in order to preserve just what is essential , forgets what is anecdotal to concentrate on the essential thing.

Alain Pierson. St Jean-de-Luz

Art to think
Esteban Ruiz’s art is first and foremost spiritual. In its etymological sense, spiritualis means characteristic of breathing.
His works have a characteristic beat, a characteristic breathing beat. We find an important Eastern reference on his work: the coincidence between a symbolic gap (the presence of circles, volumes, “sticks”, fishes carcasses in the gap) and the inside gap which we have to meet again in the way that Eastern sages invite us.
It is also spiritual because of his deep wish of going over the matter: what makes impossible to reach the Origin, the Ideal, the Absolute. This obstacle is not the Matter conceived like a metaphysical entity which has its etymological origins in the mater: the mother, the source that is also present in his work, but matter as opposite to the spirit: what is perceived by senses,or what makes possible that ideas become incarnated and that the Creator fulfill himself.
In the style of the actual atom physicists, the matter has a tendency to lose its consistency and the concret character that the common sense gives to it; and the entities where it is set up are not directly observed but they are more and more abstract and conceptual. In that way, the spirit of his works wants to make forget just the matter of the material, of the material itself, like in his new works which questionate the idea itself of the painting like an object, and like a fixed object.The techniques of expression are considerated by the artist just like instruments and the pictorical language like one more.
This is why the perception of Esteban Ruiz’s work may be the result of a misunderstanding. We like or we might like his work because of aspects that the artist considers without any importance (the sensitive and material aspect). This is not important since the important thing is not what the artist means,( his ideas, his language full of symbols like a new esoteric language adressed to initiated) but how the work makes you think. This provocation of thought doesn’t arise just because of the implicit or explicit concepts of the play itself but because of the expression of an emotional tonality .
This emotional tonality, which is a mouthfull ( of breathing and of spirit), seems mysterious due to the presence of certain ambiguities. The presenceof texts that are an essential part of the play and at the same time, belongs to the embodied thought of those myths- Don Quixote, Don Juan, Faust, for example-paradoxical presence of nudity- which is the gap like strength that fill this space and like disappearance of the material aspect of the work-, obsessive presence of his sacred scenes, but also of the material matter that comes back to take revenge.
Consequently, the truth of his work is not to be found in the understanding of the artist’s conscious ideas, or in the different references of his work (primitive religions, the Eastern culture, or the moder physic) or in any interpretation at all. His strength is that of a “machine” of thinking that force us to think.

Sebastien Courtois. Paris