Born in 1993 in Lisbon, Portugal, Pedro Ruxa lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.

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.

Pedro Ruxa

Description

Location

With a certificate of authenticity signed by the Artist.

Authentication

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Painting

Tranquility Base (#9)

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Tranquility Base (Love System)

Acrylic on canvas 
2020
A life-size portrait of the artist making love to a giant letter U, as a semantical metaphor for the Other, 'You'. Purposely the size of a Queen sized mattress as a reference to gay culture vocabulary, this work reflects on the artist's past relationships. A seemingly dialogue between the artist and language, the painting actually becomes the artist's own monologue.

Authentication 

Front

detail

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Me & U

Acrylic on canvas 
2019
One of the ways that we perceive shape is through seeing motion. Visual motion may be actively generated (for example, in locomotion), or passively observed. In the study of the perception of three-dimensional structure from motion, the non-moving, passive observer in an environment of moving rigid objects has been used as a substitute for an active observer moving in an environment of stationary objects; this 'rigidity hypothesis' has played a central role in computational and experimental studies of structure from motion. Here we show that this is not an adequate substitution because active and passive observers can perceive three-dimensional structure differently, despite experiencing the same visual stimulus: active observers' perception of three-dimensional structure depends on extraretinal information about their own movements.

A world in motion is perceived by a moving viewer as if they were both not moving

Acrylic on canvas 
2019 
The eye and the circle are recurrent symbols in Ruxa's oeuvre. As a symbol of the infinitely small and the infinitely big, the circle refers to the atom as much as it refers to the planet, it alludes to a cyclical phenomenon, with no beginning and no ending. 
The eye, a circle on its own, is like a portal of perception that is straightly connected to the brain, to our consciousness and our emotions.

Reality Looks Like

Acrylic on canvas 
2020
'Cadmium Love' is a declaration of love to the painting itself, it paints a moment in time, just before the artist and painting make love and become one. A sister piece to Ruxa's work, 'Me & U', and purposely on a canvas that is the size of a Queen mattress, this work reflects on the artist's intimate relationships. Like a portrait of two lovers, the composition becomes a monologue, an intellectual inner dialogue in the artist's psyche, and an unconditional, timeless, unbreakable homage to his love for painting.

Cadmium Love

Colored Pencil on Black Paper 
2019 
One of the ways that we perceive shape is through seeing motion. Visual motion may be actively generated (for example, in locomotion), or passively observed. In the study of the perception of three-dimensional structure from motion, the non-moving, passive observer in an environment of moving rigid objects has been used as a substitute for an active observer moving in an environment of stationary objects; this 'rigidity hypothesis' has played a central role in computational and experimental studies of structure from motion. Here we show that this is not an adequate substitution because active and passive observers can perceive three-dimensional structure differently, despite experiencing the same visual stimulus: active observers' perception of three-dimensional structure depends on extraretinal information about their own movements.

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Drawing

Acrylic on canvas 
2019
In his work, Ruxa seeks a parallel between the visible and the invisible. How does one represent emotions, which are by nature, invisible, in a painting? As a painter, he uses colours to represent feelings. He seeks this correspondence, not only with colours but also shapes, textures, etc. even if it is through intuitive research rather than scientific. There have been multiple attempts to categorize emotions in a methodical format like that of a color wheel and for this work, Ruxa drew particular inspiration from Robert Plutchiks's Wheel of Emotions.

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Emotional Color Wheel

Acrylic on canvas 
2019
This work and its title are inspired by a poem by Al Berto. 
Translated title is 'And if he writes orange on the soul, will the soul taste better?'
'(...) will the fall of the orange cause the poem? 
is the flying orange, or is it not, an orange imagined by a madman? 
and a madman, will he know what an orange is? 
what if the orange falls? and the poem? and the poem with a falling orange? 
(...) and if he writes orange on the soul, will the soul taste better? 
and if he writes orange in his heart, will passion prevent him from dying? 
and if he writes orange in sex, will the desire increase?'

Description 

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E se escrevesse laranja na alma, ficaria a alma saborosa ?

Colored Pencil on Black Paper 
2019
Ruxa’s text paintings and text drawings are a reflection of how the brain interprets visual perception. One does not actually ‘see’; the human eye does not have any form of consciousness or ability to perceive an image by itself. It is the brain that receives stimulus from the eye and reacts by creating a mental interpretation, a picture. As such, an image is full of words, like a text is full of images. There is no physical difference between a text and a picture. The artist became fascinated by this and thus wondered whether a text would already be a subject on its own, an object, a picture. To him, text paintings and drawings are the same as all his other paintings just without concrete representations - they are all projections of a picture in the brain.

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Each thing in its time has its time, the trees do not blossom in winter nor does the white cold cover the fields in spring

Convelio

Colored Pencil on Black Paper 
2019 
7 Works, each 4.6 x 3.3 inch
Ruxa became interested in the idea of a spot of paint as an object. This came about after a long period of thinking about the barriers between abstract and figurative painting and how ambiguous that limit is. The artist realized that a single spot of paint, which is the most abstracted shape there is, can occupy a space the same way a concrete object would, and so acquire a physical status. In this 7 drawing installation, Ruxa recreates, with spots of paint, the 7 primary colors in the visible light spectrum, known as ‘spectral colors’, or more commonly, the colors of the rainbow.

Paint Spots

Pedro Ruxa

Also by Pedro Ruxa

Tranquility Base (#9)

Tranquility Base (Love System)

Me & U

A world in motion is perceived by a moving viewer as if they were both not moving

Reality Looks Like

Cadmium Love

A world in motion is perceived by a moving viewer as if they were both not moving

Emotional Color Wheel

E se escrevesse laranja na alma, ficaria a alma saborosa ?

Each thing in its time has its time, the trees do not blossom in winter nor does the white cold cover the fields in spring

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Pedro Ruxa

Also by Pedro Ruxa

Tranquility Base (#9)

Tranquility Base (Love System)

Me & U

A world in motion is perceived by a moving viewer as if they were both not moving

Reality Looks Like

Cadmium Love

A world in motion is perceived by a moving viewer as if they were both not moving

Emotional Color Wheel

E se escrevesse laranja na alma, ficaria a alma saborosa ?

Each thing in its time has its time, the trees do not blossom in winter nor does the white cold cover the fields in spring

Paint Spots