Carlos Franco-Ruiz

This series focuses on the feeling of statelessness. The work seek to be a representation of the here/there/anywhere in which my subject/reference is not tied to any place. This theme stems from my own experience of being born to immigrant parents and now living as an immigrant in another country. Being from a different culture there is a loss of belonging and search for belonging in the new environment. The question of where one fit within the dynamic of the new environment/culture is a constant in daily life.

With the new series, the focus will be on the paintings and canvas itself, removing the stretcher bars to allow more freedom for experimentation and mark making. Though the paintings are not an explicit representation of my internal struggle they are a manifestation of that struggle through painting. The focus is to create a sense of statelessness within the confines of the canvas, attempting to create a pictorial image that is recognizable but not tied to anyone place, neither here/there. It is no longer Uruguay, United States or Nicaragua, it every everywhere and nowhere.

“I can be your home” is the tentative title because the internal struggle deals with the concept of home.

This series is entitled "Space without Memory" reflects the culmination of my research into mundane spaces that the layman can easily forget. The work creates a dialogue that confronts the idea of memory of a territory and its permanence in our collective memory. Memory itself is fragile as we forget the details of our daily environment, but I look for these lost moments, registering them in my own image bank.

For this project, I found the words of Nietzsche comforting when describing my own environment in Uruguay.

"Some people are so accustomed to being alone with themselves that they never compare themselves to others, but they spin their monologue of a life with a calm and cheerful mood, keeping good conversations with themselves, even laughing." -Friedrich Nietzsche

This series establishes to bring the vision of a disappearing Uruguayan landscape to the exhibition space. At the center of this investigation is the exploration of ephemeral spaces that inhabit our life everyday from abandoned buildings to broken shutters, possibly insignificant but reveal moments of great loneliness. "

This folder consist of work that was made prior to the most recent body of work. The paintings range from 2009-2011