Pedro Ruxa
Born in 1993 in Lisbon, Portugal, Pedro Ruxa lives and works in Brussels. Ruxa is enamored with painting and inspired by words. It is through painting, but also through objects and bits and pieces of poems that Ruxa attempts to communicate with his senses and sensibility. His works create an intimate dialogue, be it actually between himself and the paint, or us and the words.
Through a reconstructed language that is his own, shapes, colors, letters, and sentences become his subject matter. Ruxa constantly creates ever-changing clouds of words and imagery and sticks them on his studio walls, making them the starting point to his oeuvre. Yet, he simultaneously explores the restraints of this same language: what is happening before or after what we see?
The more Ruxa tends to take control over his words, his sight, and his emotions, the more he is unable to contain it within the realm of comprehension. But all this is exactly at the core of his aesthetic language and it is undeniably touching, both visually and emotionally.
Courtesy of newcube.art
Courtesy of newcube.art
I arrived in Brussels at the end of my teenage years, seeking a place where I could free myself from the boundaries of my birthplace and discover who I was and also what my art was.
I knew that art was a primordial thing in my life but at that time I didn't really know what I wanted to do with it. One thing is certain now that I see it with a bit more distance: my artistic practice has evolved in parallel as my personal quest for meaning and identity in this world. I truly feel that painting is a simulation ground for real life, where I can do "research" about my emotions, ideas, desires, fears, etc. I still see it like this today.
In the beginning, it was a lot about sexuality and love and trying to find a peaceful communication between my body, my mind, and the world around me, the others. As the years went by I feel it has become a more general quest about my journey as a human being - and all the things that describe my life experience: The research for financial stability with art, the research for love, in a physical and intellectual way, being homosexual, the research for a space to live and to create, the research for people who I feel happy to live with and share moments.
I like to see my life as a permanent cinema screen. I used to feel I was a passive spectator when I was young. I think I was too scared. Art has allowed me to become the director of this movie, accepting that I cannot control everything and that's ok, I can still make my own decisions, I can follow my intuitions and desires, and try to fulfil them, but also that I have to trust other people and take risks sometimes. "You can't find love on a way street" - This has become one of the main sayings for my personal life but also for my art and the people I work with. This is not a road you can walk alone.
But I'm no cinema director - I'm mostly a painter. I think what appealed to me in painting since very early, was its extreme freedom, the capacity of creating impossible worlds. In painting, one is able to make collide different spaces, different times, different eras. All kinds of physical and intellectual objects meet together and coexist in a single picture. This idea of encounter is very important to me and very often in my paintings, I represent two objects facing each other. It's like a love date. And of course, this is not empty of meaning - this for sure was inspired by my personal experiences in gay meeting apps, this idea of meeting someone completely unknown for the first time for a loving purpose, and touching one’s body, one’s universe for the first time. Like two planets, or two atoms, sweetly rubbing into each other. Love and sexuality have therefore become regular themes in my work, but they also became a metaphor for all human relationships and all kinds of things connecting with each other. It's the idea of communication, between different things, that fascinates me and that is the very intimate center of my artistic research.
I remember that in art school I discovered the Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and that I was deeply touched by his "Ethics and Infinity", his idea of responsibility towards the other, and also his idea of facing someone, to face someone, "the face is what forbids us to kill".
What's interesting is that I never considered myself as a queer artist or a gay-theme painter. And I never had any political or social conscious intention at all. I was just trying to express myself and share my experience of love and human connection. But recently I realized it isn't that simple. And when I see the work I've been doing for the last years I do recognize that there is something in it that can relate to queer revendication and social awareness, even if it wasn't my purpose. I was just sharing my vision of love but the thing is, as a homosexual artist painting about love, well, it speaks about homosexual love, and so it speaks about the possibility of this love, and the possibility to exhibit such paintings in an exhibition to everyone to see and being free to paint them without fear. And so, very recently, I realized that whether I want it or not, I have some kind of responsibility in this matter. I was lucky to be born in Europe, to grow up in a relatively open-minded background, and I'm lucky to live in a country where I have no fear to live and express my sexuality the way I feel it, to the point it seems like an obvious thing to me. But actually, this is a privilege. If I was born in another country perhaps I would never be able to express my sexuality this way, or perhaps I wouldn't even be able to go to art school and be an artist at all.
I'm trying to give an assumed place to these questions in my work now. I'm not trying to write a queer or a gay manifesto with my work but simply showing, all around me, that "I'm gay and being gay is super, there's nothing to hide about it, I am lucky to have the freedom to talk about it and paint about it without fear, and it should be this way for everyone everywhere in the world".
