GIOVANNA RUZ: IMPREGNABLE AND MYSTERIOUS
Each region has its own landscape, that which defines it. The one we visualize: close/far or own/other; grandiose/minuscule or natural/urban, central/local and all the objective differentiations that we can establish. However, in the world of art –as has been seen and said–, we look at surprising landscapes that expose unimagined realities. Pictures or windows that, just like the aforementioned landscape environments, urge us to repeat the experience of present observation, rescuing its strength and character. Those conditions that identify and define it as a cultural heritage that, in the case of ancient peoples, demands protection, and, in the daily condition, implies unraveling values for its continuity.
Each landscape, real and created, is a piece of history that can be relived. As such, it reflects a timeless historical journey that visibly shapes individual and collective identity. For this reason, Giovanna Ruz's creative search effort – from the most immediate and everyday – makes sense.
The perception, appreciation, analysis and knowledge of the nature of places and their inhabitants (humans and animals) play fundamental roles in the realization of our identity. That is why it is necessary to know and understand one's own environment. Giovanna travels through the exterior landscape that she has seen since her childhood, but she perceives it with different eyes and appropriates certain images that allow her to provoke the final identification of the spectator. In truth, the local landscape also refers her to her own personal experience. It is there, in those instances of inner knowledge, when perception plays a fundamental role in defining the image represented.
Giovanna Ruz is a traveler. And as such, she recognizes that in each of her plastic actions (directed brushstrokes with heavy and light matter, sanded blots and errors and any other trace of her creative process, end up being reflections of herself. Thus, the painted landscape, just as the natural or urban, is memory.
Beyond their tangible limits, Giovanna Ruz's dramatic and phantasmagorical animal landscapes sustain the traces of the past, reconstruct memories, project helplessness... From the gaze of the shadows of another time that only exists as an experience, her images are transfigured into moving messages that succumb to consciousness, because any landscape (like it or not) is full of meaning and, therefore, has a high potential for symbolism.
By way of example, the emaciated, wounded and sore dogs to the point of brutal disfigurement of the pictorial matter simultaneously present the vulnerability of the animal world, the depredation of the intimate setting, the breakdown of human and animal dignity and much more. The landscape for G. Ruz is an interior subject. His dialogue, unlike the sacred encounter that the land implies for the indigenous, is directly shocking, because it exposes –through his lugubrious and powerful plastic language– a universally denied problem: the predatory aggression of the species for survival.
For this reason, it is also worth wondering about the symbolic value of our everyday landscape, about the meanings we assign to it and the meanings we perceive in it. In this regard, he comments: “we are pure landscape, but it has never seemed like a subject for my painting. I always carry it in here (he says pointing to his body), raw, because it is impregnable and mysterious and that is what I try to rescue. Not necessarily looking to please. My painting communicates something that is not complacent in itself”.
And it is true, because Giovanna exposes through a dark palette that – recalls, for example, the plastic interventions of Goya and Rembrandt, as well as A. Kiefer and G. Baselitz – exhibits from the silent, drowned and hidden how the external mutilations diminish identity. Without stopping, without stopping to think if the formal models serve her or not, she penetrates into the interior of nature. He makes the landscape his personal territory and that of its inhabitants, but also of those who understand nothing of this subterranean landscape. In such circumstances, the need to pay attention to it and allocate efforts to the care of that other landscape becomes increasingly clear and urgent. This undoubtedly implies a reflective process that manifests itself through a wide range of actions: knowledge, understanding, assessment, conservation, preservation, and safeguarding or restoration. All of the above with the ultimate goal of maintaining the landscape in a certain order, that is, in a state of active stillness in which the innumerable protagonists that make it up manage to remain balanced and harmoniously related. Strong and repetitive brushstrokes with pure and brutal pictorial matter, diaphanous transparencies that endless darkness, various attacks on the support, drippings (more or less justified) provide that thickness to the content of a work nested in human reality. That is, in the trail that life drags and its confrontation with the depraved hidden violence. This vigorous pictorial link is without precedent in current art, because from his own tragedy he proposes, like a mirage, the possibility of a return to a natural condition and belonging that, in the case of the animal world, has no remedy for reasons of origin. And, in the case of the human being, it exposes and laments, but it also invites us to create a new landscape.