Alfredo Ruiz: camins cap a la modernitat a les falles
IVAM / Generalitat Valenciana / 2023
curated / exhibition design / editorial design
IVAM's recent line of action around the fallas is part of the Lab/IVAM – City Project, which aims to connect the museum with the cultural activity and study of what happens to its local environment. The objective is to revalue the historical framework of the festival and, thus, elucidate its influence on the present and future of the celebration, necessarily changing depending on the current sociopolitical context.
The present research work on the work of the artist Alfredo Ruiz Ferrer is focused in this direction. Born in the city of Valencia in 1944 and trained in the Fallas workshops since he was thirteen years old, he displayed his work almost uninterruptedly from 1968 until he closed his workshop in 2002. Subsequently, and until 2013, he only returned to planting Fallas on a. very punctual ocasions.
Along the way, Alfredo Ruiz went from making fallas of the baroque and grotesque style inherited from his masters—with great public recognition—to finally finding himself in abstract minimalism, incorporating for the first time references to the artistic styles of the international avant-garde into the fallas. A progressive formal purification that was accompanied by the critical treatment of profound social issues and that made debate possible in the public space forum. This path was the inevitable result of the sincere attitude to which he dedicated his life, searching for a language that he could finally endure. A whole battle against the baroque to, in essence, be able to burn the beauty.
With the conception of Fallas as a gift offered to the city, Alfredo Ruiz was always captivated by public space, by the street, as the place to be and share. This space, which transcends the borders of the museum, is what consecrates it as an essential reference, for the value of opening and making paths possible. And all this in the middle of this geometric forest.
Coordination from the Museum
Sandra Moros, Irene Bonilla
Photography
Juan García (IVAM), Mirguel Lorenzo (IVAM), Ricardo Ruíz
Video
Raquel Cambralla
Video collaborations
Alfredo Ruiz, Ana Sopedra, Anna Ruiz, Giovanni Nardin, Reyes Pe, Ricard Balanzà, Miguel Hache, Miguel Arraiz
Other collaborations
Manuel P. Bernat, Anna Ruiz
The project exhibited and inventoried drawings and models created by Alfredo Ruiz, according to a chronological route.
7 july 2012
Radiograph 1
After making an innovation proposal - that some consider aberrant, in a context in which archaism and tradition are worshipped like a Patron Saint, I decided to write a few pages on this interesting and peculiar activity. Making fallas (effigies). Making what I dedicated forty-five years of my life to, since I started as an apprentice until circum- stances caused me to stop in 2002. As you can see, this evolution was not a whim but an awareness and the illusion of a non-conformist attitude. I never tried to change the festival, just give it another perspective, another path, more like a sincere desire that has never left me. A desire for development and modernity and, why not, commitments.
This commitment to the creative and cultural evolution had and still has its censors: the conservatives who believe there is only one way of doing things. I think each person needs to follow their own ways to be able to develop and, of course, you have to be open-minded to understand this.
The fallas possess the virtue of giving and making gifts. This virtue that Nietzsche tells us about in his Zaratustra. A virtue that allows us to be lavish artists and and creative squanderers. This virtue of the falla brings us close to the people in the street, the public space that belongs to everyone. A public space in which a diversity of thoughts, characters and tastes come together. Fallas are made for all of these and for everyone to understand and enjoy them; we have art, the manifest diversity of art, whatever its aesthetics may be.
[...]
Alfredo Ruiz
“Salí de la exposición pensando que la linealidad y el camino inalterable de las tradiciones tienen los dias contados. Que la inclinación y el movimiento desviado, del que hablaba Epicuro, el clinamen, opuesto al meramente vertical, al inmutable y permanente, fundamenta la libertad y nos obliga a repensar las cosas. Como el niño que no se conforma con la costrucción primigenia y se obliga y nos obliga a ver una y mil veces la construccion deconstruida.” Pere Rosa_Escritor
Alfredo Ruiz: camins cap a la modernitat a les falles
IVAM / Generalitat Valenciana / 2023
direction / editorial design / print
400 copies
As a monograph, the book covers the life and work of Alfredo Ruiz. Its content is structured according to the axes of the exhibition: chronology and the Geometric Forest. For this reason, it houses the most notable photographic archive of the investigation, along with photographs of the exhibition and the cremà of the Geometric Forest, as Alfredo's last work. In addition, it also includes the curator's research text, reflections by different authors, as well as the exhibition inventory.
In this way, an extensive monograph in content has been consolidated and the editorial design has been a tool to ensure a simple understanding of the artist's career by the user. The book, as an object, shows Alfredo's personality: it is red, geometric and pure. This is because the author's series of red faults is probably the one that most identifies him. Inside, the sets of pages and white and red inks alternate, changing the weight of the paper according to the nature of the content displayed.
Collaborations
Nuria Enguita, Anna Ruiz, Álvaro de los Ángeles, Alejandro Lagarda, Albert Ferrer, Romà de la Calle, Vicent Borrego, Ricardo Ruíz, Alfredo Ruiz
ISBN
978-84-482-6878-7
