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 

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Me & U

Acrylic on canvas 
2019
This painting shows Planet Earth from the furthest distance a human can perceive it. The paradox lies in the fact that Earth as a globe is not a point of view we can ever perceive with our own eyes. It is only a constructed mental picture, based on photographs we have seen, taken from outer space and popular culture imagery. But strangely, it seems to be the clearest one. In Pedro Ruxa’s work, he expresses how he can see clearly with his eyes closed, because he sees with his heart. This work praises the heart, a symbol for all that is invisible, imaginative, emotional, felt, and unconscious in our human lives.

Description 

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I Close My Eyes to See

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

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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Drawing

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

Colored Pencil on Black Paper 
2019
In his research into how we see reality, Ruxa became interested in the stages involved in the perception process. There is a chain of reactions happening in our bodies. The apparition of a light source, the light that is reflected by the surface of objects, the eye which receives the light, the brain which receives the information, the interpretation the brain creates in our consciousness, and finally what this image provokes emotionally. The chain of sensation-perception-emotion is not inspired by a particular scientific theory, but rather a more simplified, intuitive, and personal one. Ruxa sees sensation as the reception of a stimulus from the outside world by the visual organ, perception as the conscious image of this stimulus projected in the brain, and finally emotion as the reaction to this image.

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This is Real

Colored Pencil on Black Paper 
2019
'My body is a cage 
That keeps me from dancing with the one I love 
But my mind holds the key 
(...) 
You're standing next to me 
My mind holds the key 
Set my spirit free'
Excerpt from 'My Body is a Cage', song by Arcade Fire

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My Mind Holds the Key

Colored Pencil on Black Paper 
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 more 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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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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A world in motion is perceived by a moving viewer as if they were both not moving

Convelio

Shipping & Handling

Colored Pencil on Black Paper 
2019
Ruxa had the idea for this drawing when he was studying visual perception and reading about the emission spectrums that radiate from objects. When looking through a spectroscope or a spectrometer - a tool that allows one to analyze the composition of the light spectrum - all the objects in the physical world show a different color spectrum made up of many colours. Ruxa was intrigued, imagining how this would work for paintings, and whether he would see an alternate version of it, with all its colors separated as in the color tubes, were he to view it through a spectroscope.

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Mona Lisa Emission Spectrum

Pedro Ruxa

Also by Pedro Ruxa

Tranquility Base (#9)

Tranquility Base (Love System)

Me & U

I Close My Eyes to See

Emotional Color Wheel

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

This is Real

My Mind Holds the Key

Emotional Color Wheel

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