The art of Emilio Ruiz

Who is Emilio Ruiz?

I am Emilio Ruiz Cardenas, born on 4 May 1949 in Osorno, Chile. I grew up surrounded by nature and by the traditions of the Huilliche; I know my people and their character. I was an athlete and a democratic politician, and I have lived in exile in the Netherlands since I was twenty-eight. I know Europe and I am steeped in its culture and its artistic tradition. My biculturalism is the starting point of my artistic development. The fusion of these two identities, the Chilean and the European, is what gives my work its singularity: a conceptual and technical expression of my self-taught training.

Is your development and your creation a solitary thing?

I have taken part in collective painting groups at a European level, where I earned notable international recognition for my work with the Automatic Painting Collective of Amsterdam and with the Parisian movement Phases, which is founded on ceaseless experimentation. I am bound to them.¹

What, then, is the relationship with Cobra?²

That European artistic movement carries a broad cultural background, and a horrifying past such as the Second World War is what unites us.

How did you begin in art?

I began to draw in 1985, inspired by my new Dutch reality, a country at the forefront of contemporary art, where its great painters influenced my new artistic identity enormously. That influence shows itself in the magical contact with its museums, which are found the length of this beautiful country, and in daily contact with art.

Art in general holds solid criteria of objective communication with society, which lets human beings understand one another better through many different forms.

How do you define painting as art?

I define painting as the spiritual matter of the painter; it is a part of the dialectical feeling of the painter's experience. My canvases express those social criteria of the spirituality of the human being.

The true painter expresses in every brushstroke the authentic living being of matter, projecting the painting into magical realism, into objective communication with the social being.

What matters, on discovering matter, is to take up solid criteria of visual influence in order to define the sincere feeling of truth, where spiritual idealism can be expressed in harmony with freedom of expression, delivering a message to society that may be optimistic or negative.

Painting is therefore the spiritual matter that expresses the subconscious of the painter: their idealism, their inspiration, their fantasy, their sadness and their joy. Matter alongside the painter is not a utopia either; it is the beauty of thought together with matter, translated by the painter's hands.

How has the recognition you received taken shape?

I have received significant international awards, among them at the painting competition for Chileans in Europe sponsored by UNESCO in Paris, through which I was selected to exhibit at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Chile (1991). My work has been shown in the major contemporary art galleries since 1985 in the Netherlands, the Dutch Antilles and Belgium.

Can you name some of the galleries where you have shown your art?

Here is a record of the galleries where I exhibited between 1985 and 2003.