Esther Ruiz sculpts light and gives it a material presence as bewitching as it is intriguing. The American artist used a reduced language : a panel of mediums limited to industrial materials – neon, mirror, acrylic – and a shimmering color palette. This vocabulary combines both minimalist influences – Esther Ruiz does not hide her admiration for Eva Hesse – and the tangy and seductive colors of Pop Art.

Her series Wells, begun in 2014, presents itself as luminous installations with abstract and ambiguous shapes. To describe this series, the artist explains “The imagery I work with is born out of exploring and researching fictional places imagined in my mind.” The games of reflections invites oneself to enter another reality in constant change. The minimalist vocabulary allows the artist to shape a collection of emotions, memories, sound and light impressions in a strange and alluring body.

The mirror rigidity contrasts with the fascinating light of the neon and subverts our expectations. These abstract bodies evoke ancestral celestial or aquatic entities that captivate us. The watcher is pleasantly transported in this unreal space where the games of luminous echoes and altered perspectives seems to forbid us from escaping these intriguing pieces. 

The one to whom nature begins to uncover its mysteries open to all, feels an irresistible fondness for art, its worthy interpreter” said Goethe. Esther Ruiz studied geology, and her abstract creations combine the chance of natural forms and the subtle presence of the Artist hand, that shapes and molds light and industrial materials. The ambiguous space thus presents itself as the experience of a communion of two foreign bodies. Her sculptures, with meditative accents, invite to the contemplation of space and time. Neon and fluorescent colors recall the colorful palette of Pop Art, and popular culture more generally, and Esther Ruiz was early seduced by their soft luminescence. The result gives a tangible presence to light first, but also to the fictional places created in her and reflected by the echoes of bizarre shapes of her Wells. Light and color are common tools for the artist, who molds them and manipulates them as he pleases. From a scientific perspective, color is however a simple sensation of intangible light captured and transformed by the eye. It is nevertheless a total engagement, both physical and visual that are formed by these delicate luminous wells.

“In such reveries that seize the meditating man, details wear away, picturesque fades, the bell does not ring anymore and space expands without limit.”
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetic of Space.

Inès Molière – sobering galerie