'Souvenirs de voyages' by Francesc Ruiz Abad at the Palais de la Porte Dorée

The painter Francesc Ruiz Abad presents Souvenirs de voyages at the Palais de la Porte Dorée, an on-site creation for the hall of honor. With this monumental work completely painted by hand, Francesc Ruiz Abad echoes the animal representations of bas-relief and the omnipresence of painting in the Palace.

The project is inspired by collections of graphic archives of the Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes and the National Museum of Histoire naturelle, contributing to maintaining an exotic imagery. Francesc Ruiz Abad continues here his research on the analogies between the order of the animal kingdom and the exercise of power present in Western heritage architecture. Finally, it invites reflection on the pigments used and their names, which find their origin in colonial history.

Francesc Ruiz Abad, winner of the 2015 Arranz-Bravo Visual Arts Award, is one of the best exponents of emerging Catalan painting. Indeed, painting regains centrality within the demanding – and so often iconoclastic – contemporary artistic scene; and to a large extent this reality has been possible thanks to the fresh, forceful and purposeful renewal, with which a new generation of painters, born during the nineties, who, like Francesc Ruiz, are committed to a painting without complexes or prejudices, open to action, transversality, travel, social, vital and communal empathy and purposeful optimism.

Francesc Ruiz's references are common to the new generation of painters: Peter Doig, Àlex Katz, David Hockney or German painting, mainly from the Leipzig school, the city where Francesc Ruiz resided. Neo Rauch, Jonathan Meese and others renounce the pictorial references of the previous generation, deeply rooted in the introspective and neo-expressionist existentialism of Kieffer, Baselitz, Barceló or Plensa, and prefer to reflect on the more ironic, psychedelic and vital work of resistant painters from our own context, such as Pere Llobera or Rasmus Nilausen.