Plan X hosts at its Milan headquarters the first solo exhibition of the artist Javier Ruiz in Italy, entitled Between the Roar Of the Night and the Murmurs of the New Day. On the way to the bonfire of the vanities, the light precedes the shadows, but it is in the shadows that we see their flame. Weariness precedes joy and time does not stop running. We hear the roar of the mountain that invokes us and we hear the murmur that announces the new day.
Javier Ruiz reveals us in this series of works, the poetic narrative of a sequence shot in painting. Works that are shaped as fragments of a great scene, united by the atrezzo of the infinite landscape and the temporal rhythm of light. In this landscape, the kingdom of truth, is where the thousand battles of the human soul are fought. In the narrative flow of the emotional, Javier continues to explore the human psyche through the perpetual dance of learning and falling. We find in this story, the procession towards redemption. Their characters, with the “grace” of the Roman emperors, are on their way to their final destination. Majestic and imperfect, we feel the sacredness and wildness of this entourage and we understand that it is only the preamble of something important that is going to happen. The great celebration of ritual awaits them.
In this prelude to darkness, the peregrination becomes a parade overflowing with the mysteries of life. Hypnotized by the roar of the mountain, this epic begins, where the costumed characters begin their march towards the bacchanal. Beyond the siren songs, the realities emerge, and before the truth that “one never knows where the devil hides” in this procession, the beautiful and the grotesque show us the two sides of the same coin.
These protagonists of carnivalesque aura, follow one after the other as enchanted creatures, leaving in question their total humanity. Struggling from their own essence to keep the light of day, they antagonize each other on their way to darkness. Upon our arrival, an immense and hermetic nocturnal landscape appears before us. The celestial vault and the flames of a bonfire illuminate the landscape, life trembles and desire stirs. We are witness to the supernatural. The scene transcends the work, the painting ceases to be painting, it is now earth and fire. In silence and with a thousand thoughts in our minds seeking solace, we perceive the sacred and the profane from deep within us.
Without knowing what is real and what is not, Javier Ruiz takes us into this dance of passions from a distance, we dance around the bonfire of vanities but with the certainty that we will find the light at the end of the way; we hear in the distance the murmurs that announce the new day…
Text by Victoria Rivers
