Francesc Ruiz

Francesc Ruiz was born in 1971 in Barcelona, where he lives and works. His elder brother’s passion for collecting comics helped him discover a world that would make him want to study Fine Art at the Universitat de Barcelona. Since the nineties, his work has focused on drawing, using comics to explore new narrative languages. He calls them ‘expanded comics’: a form beyond comic strips presented in exhibition spaces and calling for an interaction with the viewer. Adopting the strategies of Conceptual art and Situationism, the artist creates installations inspired by and developed in specific urban and geographic contexts. Working in cities like Cairo, Philadelphia, Barcelona and Lleida, among others, in each case he incorporates the imaginary of their contextual sub-cultures. Also present in his work are the idea of an image archive and the history of different comic traditions such as the Japanese yaoi, a variation of manga, and comic books, a format for editing comics. Ruiz has developed a kind of meta-comic that gives visibility to invisible collectives and the abuses of power. His centres of interest are collecting, belonging, exclusion, fantasy, cities and sub-cultures.