Simeón Saiz Ruiz, pixelated and pandemic scenes

If you try to recognize a character from the new oil paintings of Simeon Saiz Ruiz (Cuenca, 1956) will be impossible. They will all be familiar to you, but at the same time strange.

It won't take him long to realize that this was precisely the definition of Unheimlichof the sinister, enunciated by Sigmund Freud in his famous text of the same name. the familiar stranger“the terrible thing that affects the known and familiar things of old”, is an unsettling emotion that is difficult to describe.

The exposure Photos (Das Unheimlich) he continues his pictorial research as a vehicle for what is true, or at least what is plausible. The links between photography and painting are perverted in this essential artist in the history of contemporary Spanish historical painting and they do so through a personal style, his own method in which he invents his own technique.

Its themes show distorted and disturbing memories of our historical present

In gallery F2 we can see indeterminate pandemic scenes, everyday scenes taken from any medium, oil paintings and drawings on paper.

What's special is the way they were painted, which displaces and continues Saiz's pictorial style, that of the fragmentation of the brushstroke in a new version. If you get close enough to the canvas, you can see how he applies a drawing technique, scratching or lattice, to the painting.

Through the weave, different tonal values, volumes and contours are achieved depending on the proximity of the lines to each other. Also the lower layer in which you apply the colors, mainly flat and primary, spread in the same way in thin contiguous lines.

The result is some undefined, zigzag, pixelated contours, as if they were generated by ASCII computer code on an 8-bit computer. Seen up close, they create interesting abstract geometric compositions in which line and color mix in a minimalist and surprising way.

[Simeón Saiz Ruiz, frontoviki's lie]

Saiz Ruiz, distinguished disciple of the abstract painter Fernando Zóbel, doctor in Philosophy with a thesis on Derrida and professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of Cuenca, exhibitions since 1976 always articulating the variables of flat colors, thick line drawings and images from photographs.

In 1994 he was awarded the L'Oréal prize and his work belongs to the collections of the Reina Sofía Museum, the ”la Caixa” Foundation or the Patio Herreriano Museum. His painting conspires with mimesis in complex and laborious processes reminiscent of neo-impressionist pointillism, but move your themes that, far from joy of livingshow distorted and disturbing memories of our historical present.

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