French city by the sea, La Rochelle-based artist Vincent Ruffin creates vibrant, multi-layered pictorial universes in his paintings. Cast in chromatic swathes of hot and cool, Ruffin’s amorphous figures, evocative poses, and surreal environments blend art historical reference and cultural observation into paintings that pose more questions than answers. In large part, his practice converges on a de-centering of the authority of parable and moral image. Instead, Ruffin embraces ambiguity and improvisation in his work as rejections of absolutism, and experimental factors to test the limits of interpretation. Long important in his visual imaginary are colors, which become symbols for the divides between conscious and subconscious, id and ego, real and illusory.
Vincent Ruffin finds artistic intrigue in the way disparate forms interact and create a sense of visual vibration. His magical realist paintings bring together contrasting elements in relational contexts, illustrating a captivating oscillation between the real and the surreal. With their vivid colors, dreamlike visuals, and surprising element pairings, Ruffin introduces a vibrant pulse into the mundane, encouraging viewers to discover the enchanting dynamism within the everyday. Drawing inspiration from memory, personal snapshots, or discovered images, Ruffin depicts ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, situating them in fantastical, dreamlike settings that evoke a feeling of oscillating realities. His paintings, at once recognizable and strange, familiar yet mysterious, are like nostalgic dreams that invite us to feel their underlying vibrations through color and form.
Heavily inspired by philosophy and literature, Ruffin’s practice is a means of understanding human relations through the subtle vibrations of painted interactions. While his work often appears outlandish and nonsensical, these elements create an allegorical resonance reflective of his observations of the human condition. Inspired by writers such as Voltaire and Shakespeare, Ruffin deploys magical realism as a means to metabolize the fluctuating nature of the observable world around us. The pictorial plane constructed by Ruffin provides a metaphorical platform for social critique and philosophical ponderings, prompting viewers to acknowledge and observe the uncanny oscillations of everyday reality while exploring the vibrant spectrum of human existence.
