“I discover inspiration in empathy, however not as one thing tender or passive,” explains Victoria Ruiz. “For me, empathy is a type of resistance. It’s a determination to remain current with one other particular person’s expertise and never look away. I feel artwork has the facility to create that form of encounter, the place what’s private turns into shared and what has been saved quiet can lastly be felt.”
Victoria was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and migrated to Miami when she was younger because of the nation’s politics. Rising up between locations stayed together with her as each a reminiscence and a manner of understanding the world. “Residence turns into one thing you carry in fragments, and I really feel that a lot of my work comes from attempting to provide these fragments a physique,” she says. In 2017, Victoria moved to London to review for a BA in Vogue Communication and Promotion at Central Saint Martin, graduating in 2022.
That is when she actually discovered her footing as a visible artist, understanding that her image-making is a method to mirror and talk narratives she has skilled. In 2021, her artistic companion Helena Cebrián invited Victoria to her hometown of Rio de Janeiro. “That 12 months modified the whole lot for me,” says Victoria. “Rio gave my work a deeper relationship with my religion, nature and the potential for discovering life even in tough circumstances.”
Since this pivotal second, Victoria has been based mostly between Rio and London, working throughout pictures, costume, sculpture, set up and efficiency. She usually attracts her concepts from carnival and magical realism – two forces she sees as holding life’s contradictions. “Carnival holds the complexity of life in a really trustworthy manner. It may be stunning and unsettling on the identical time,” she says. “It will probably carry grief inside celebration and provides type to issues which are tough to specific.” The characters that emerge from her follow inhabit this in-between house – they’re vivid, bodily, spiritually charged and rooted in a Latin American visible tradition.
Victoria’s course of begins by studying, watching movies, listening to tales and sitting with a topic till it begins to stay inside her emotionally. “The narrative is the muse of the whole lot,” she explains. “The message must be clear in my coronary heart earlier than the work can exist bodily.” From there, the method is bodily and intuitive, with items constructed by hand via repetition and accumulation till a dressing up or sculpture begins to really feel like a dwelling being. In Coexistence of Excessive Feelings, from the sequence We Knew the World in Fragments of Shade, the piece is without delay one among her most visually arresting and most personally uncooked pictures.
Towards a burning orange floor, a determine in a Spider-Man masks faces an unlimited, towering presence draped in yellow, blue and crimson – the colors of the Venezuelan flag. “I see myself within the Spider-Man character, going through this huge presence that represents my nation and the whole lot I really feel in the direction of it. There may be a lot love there, but additionally disappointment and grief,” she says. “It speaks about lacking residence, loving it deeply, and on the identical time having to confront the ache of what it has develop into.”
Then there’s Mis Flores Para Tu Altar, from the sequence Para Tú Altar: Las Fuerzas Divinas de la Naturaleza, a piece that strikes from grief in the direction of one thing nearer to gratitude. Seven figures, every wearing elaborate hand-sewn flower clothes in riotous color, come collectively and type a dense amalgamation of petals. The work attracts instantly from Victoria’s personal religious follow and her relationship together with her Orishas. “My religion has guided me via among the darkest moments of my life,” she says. “Flowers are choices, however they’re additionally a language. They converse to nature, to the divine, to renewal and to the stability we’re all the time looking for.”
Alongside her solo work, neighborhood and collaboration are additionally woven into her follow. A mask-making and pictures workshop held in Rio in 2021 with Helena and their buddy Hiltinho – who welcomed them into his residence and neighbourhood – produced pictures stuffed with play and togetherness, handmade Brazil shirts impressed by the nationwide equipment, masks and soccer. “I like creating areas the place folks can join via creativity,” Victoria says, “particularly outdoors of conventional artwork environments.”
What’s subsequent? Properly, Victoria is at the moment an artist-in-residence at Sarabande: The Lee Alexander McQueen Basis in London, the place she is constructing in the direction of her first solo exhibition – a venture rooted in her response to the continuing scenario in Venezuela, a rustic she hasn’t returned to in a decade. “Making this work has develop into a deeply meditative and reflective course of,” she says. “As a result of I’ve the privilege to talk freely via my work, I wish to use that house to discuss Venezuela, about what has been occurring, and about what it means to hold a rustic with you from a distance.” It’s, like the whole lot she makes, an act of resistance – and of affection.
