Exhibitions
Image of a secret
Confluences between the present and the past in the work of Francesc Ruestes at the La Mercè Cultural Center.
At the La Mercè Cultural Center, from June 4 to July 30, Image of a Secret is presented, an exhibition curated by Eudald Camps that proposes an unusual journey: rather than looking back, it invites us to observe how time overlaps and is rewritten within the work of Francesc Ruestes.
The proposal is not a conventional retrospective, but a space of living tension between creative stages that may seem distant at first glance, but which here dialogue naturally. In this field, past and present are not opposed: they converge, recognize each other and transform.
Ruestes, trained as a disciple of Josep Granyer and linked to the creative ecosystem that connects with figures such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Brossa and Joan Ponç, builds a body of work that avoids any rigid classification. Far from the temptation of "isms", his career defends an internal continuity, a coherence that persists beyond historiographic labels.
Eva Cobo. Geological evidence, 1985. Francesc Ruestes.
In this sense, his practice can be understood as a kind of autobiographical deconstruction: an exercise in which different vital and formal moments are reunited, as if recognizing each other after a long silence. What might seem like dispersion is actually revealed as the same voice that changes register without losing identity.
Ruestes' work is part of a constant search for the great questions of art and thought: who we are, where we are and where we are going. But this question is not formulated from a solemn point of view, but from a rigorous formal exploration that seeks new visual syntaxes, capable —in Foix's words— of opening up nature to us.
Image of a secret, 2001. Francesc Ruestes.
This nature, in the artist's universe, is never univocal. It is multifaceted, made up of multiple conceptual and sensitive layers that oscillate between abstraction—the limit, the infinite—and the most poetic concretion. A nature that does not describe, but rather proposes readings, displacements and fissures.
The exhibition also dialogues with a broader tradition that crosses disciplines and geographies. From “wall sculpture” to references such as Eva Hesse, Robert Rauschenberg, Daniel Spoerri or Sheila Hicks, Ruestes incorporates a clear desire to break boundaries between artistic languages, expanding the margins of what we understand by sculpture or painting.
In this context, the exhibition becomes an exercise in temporal reconciliation. Putting “ancient” and “recent” works into dialogue dissolves the old quarrel between ancient and modern and questions the need to divide creation into watertight periods. As if historiography, with its obsession with chronologies, had forgotten that artists do not change skin with each label.
Dreamy Space, 2025. Francesc Ruestes.
You may be
interested
...
