Los Angeles-based painter Conrad Ruíz interrogates the link between fire and catharsis as it gets circulated in today’s media, no longer tethered to the moralism we see in puritan American history. Where Eagles Dare comprises seven watercolor paintings that develop the artist’s investigation of this new American sublime.
For the past 3 years, Ruíz has worked with watercolor paint to produce arresting representations of people and machines engulfed by fire. The fluidity of watercolor paint, as opposed to acrylic or oil, imparts a visual imprecision that recalls the blur of photographs taken in motion, or the distorting effects of light as filtered through flame. His paintings, when viewed from afar, take on a realist allegiance to illusionistic space. But when viewed up close, the artist’s brushstrokes supersede their context, similar to how pixels, noise, or grain overpower their scenes in blown-up
photographs. Like the properties of fire itself, Ruíz’s surfaces contain a tension between the material and the immaterial, the abstract and the figural.
Conrad Ruiz (*1983 in L.A., USA) received his MFA from the California College of the Arts, he lives and works in Los Angeles.