Ruiz de Infante Francisco

born in 1966

media artist, videographer, visual artist, writer

Fragile architectures to live in
Francisco Ruiz de Infante is part of a generation of artists whose sensibility is marked by the encounter and confrontation of technology with other very basic materials. In his works he seamlessly combines technological appliances with emergency D-I-Y.
Invariably short-lived, his constructions are the result of an "in situ" experience taken to the extreme. They are created around, for and in the place that provokes them.
In his conception of exhibitive space, the notion of a "walk through", or of a circuit, is uppermost. And, in this sense, then, he builds alleys, paths, tunnels, gateways...: physical rituals of entrance to his "fragile architectures", half-way between building and ruin.
Complex Accelerators of Unconsciousness ("walk throughs" and "puzzle solving")
The participatory "walk throughs" that he designs and the displacement generated by them, sometimes constitute a "trap" designed to immerse the spectator in a process of questioning his or her own perceptive reality.
Francisco Ruiz de Infante recreates some of the ways that memory works when activated in the present: in the shape of strong currents full of erroneous information or as a flood of images set on restart in an unending loop. His multimedia installations are complex accelerators of unconsciousness.
References to childhood recur in his entire body of work. Childhood, or better, the path from childhood / adolescence / adulthood, runs through his various projects making us enter into spaces in which the "unusual ordinary" becomes manifest (places for learning, half-dismantled sets for festivals, rule free game arcades in which no one plays, menacing childlike cabins, mad building games on a one size scale, puzzle solving lacking any tangible logic, multimedia spaces of absurd violence...).
The line between reality and fiction (learning, education and risk)
His revision and analysis of these "formative" stages of human life raises, subjectwise, some of the dangers of education-"modelization" and its deformation-development in adult society (a highly "puerilizing" society in today's context, in which the noise of the media irresponsibly dictates the rhythm of collective thought).
As one walks through his installations, one can find direct allusions to the methods of construction, unfettered by hierarchical norms, of childhood. In his work, the subjects of scale, of the unfinished thing, of the hidden place, of the incredible complexity of inefficient spaces, of inexact symmetry, of highly sophisticated disorder... are transformed into a dangerous and disturbing reality.
As part of the "acceleration" generated by an accumulation of sensorial and conceptual elements in the works, Ruiz de Infante confronts us with some of the absurd and terrible forms of overly automatic conduct that are a consequence of the social rules of adults. With the help of obstacles and by slowing down the unimpeded movement of the spectator, he questions the notion, that certain ideologies would have us believe, of "the forbidden" in a "zero risk" society; a society that often confuses "participation" with "manipulation"; "good education" with "lack of curiosity". His devices show us (often in a very physical manner) that life is a risky business and that we must always be on the look out.

source:http://www.artgates.com/frame.php?http://www.artgates.com/documentation/infante/

http://www.ruizdeinfante.org/ http://bluesky-buenosaires.net/ http://www.ecartproduction.net/v2/106/fransisco-ruiz-de-infante/