Francesc Ruiz is a Spanish-born artist who lives and works in Barcelona and Berlin. Utilizing pop culture idioms—billboards, advertising, magazines, and the Internet—Ruiz constructs new narrative models from the traditional comic form. His subjects are often urban subcultures, which he depicts through a rich synthesis of drawings, photographs, printed materials, and found imagery. Recently, he has exhibited at L’Estruch, Sabadell, Barcelona; and the Abadía de Santo Domingo de Silos, Burgos. 

What initially drew you to the language of comics? How would you characterize your particular approach to the form?

FR: In Spain we have a big tradition of weekly cartoon magazines, and during the 1980s, after the dictatorship, there was a big revolution in comic book magazines for adults. My older brother was a collector of all this new stuff, and I borrowed them from him. It was a great period with a lot of avant-garde comic authors like Micharmut, Javier Mariscal, Pere Joan, among others. During that period, while I was in high school, I drew some comics. Later, I decided to study Fine Arts and I started developing a fascination with buildings and the city. When I finished my degree, I started making models of some apartment buildings. One day in 2000, I decided to make a big drawing—an elevation view of a big department store in Barcelona—and I realized that it was kind of like a big comic book. Since then I’ve been making comics from the contemporary art perspective—some people call them expanded comics, but I rather think of them as devices for creating a commentary on reality using use the grammar of comics mixed with some conceptual art and Situationist strategies.

What inspired your piece for this series, and how did the idea evolve into its finished form?

FR: This piece come from my ongoing Newsstand series, in which I create structures similar to newsstands but where all of the covers have been drawn by me, with speech balloons added with the idea that all the characters depicted could talk to each other.

This comic was in some way inspired by the Gus Van Sant film “My Own Private Idaho.” There’s a scene where the male models on the covers of some gay magazines in a sex shop start to talk each other. In my comic for Creative Time, I appropriated the covers of journals and magazines that were available on April 18. I’m not doing drawings—I just put everything together and try to add some dialogue in order to create a new narrative over the preexisting one.

Your work often represents or focuses on, quite compassionately and thoughtfully, groups living outside of what society generally considers “normative” lifestyles. What attracts you to these subcultures, and how do position yourself in relation to them when you’re making your work?

FR: In my work, I think I’m always talking about myself to some degree. And even if I have problems with the word “subculture,” I’m definitely not into normative lifestyles. It’s interesting how some groups I’ve been depicting as gay bears or Yaoi fans have suddenly become quite mainstream in their respective spaces. I focused my attention on these groups because they were breaking stereotypes, and continue to do so, especially people interested in Yaoi—which I think is the biggest revolution that has happened in recent comic book history.

In many of your works (including the one for this series), you mimic mainstream media outlets in order to expose or subvert the cultural “realities” they construct. For your project at the Temple Gallery’s Philagrafika 2010, you created a full-sized newsstand, designed to resemble an actual Philadelphia news kiosk but featuring imaginary periodicals and newspapers. Can you talk a little more about how and why you have adopted the tropes of the news media in your work?

FR: The first time I did a newsstand was in Barcelona (Kiosk Downtown, 2007), a city were they are very popular. I was walking through the street and I was wondering about what could happen if I recreated the whole content of the newsstand, and then made all of the characters that appear on the front covers talk to one another, like a huge comic book. Then I tried to create a conceptual space for these characters—they had to talk about their feelings and about their situation inside the newsstand itself, as if they were inhabitants of this structure, part of a parallel society.

Philadelphia Newsstand (2010) was an attempt to create the newsstand as an analogy of the city of Philadelphia in a very subjective way. The covers depicted neighborhoods, institutions, bars, and citizens, among other things, and constructed a narrative that included STDs, the Mural Arts Program, and graffiti, intertwined with race and class issues.

Now I’m preparing a new newsstand for Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo, and it will be more in line with the intervention I did for Creative Time Comics. I bought a copy of each item sold in a newsstand on May 10, and I’m going to add speech bubbles to the covers to create a commentary on the present situation of the city and the country.

In Soy Sauce, a series of short cartoon magazines published in Barcelona, you constructed an innovative distribution method for the work: each of these comic books appeared intermittently over a period of eight months, with the story of one magazine ending in the specific place where the next issue would be sold. Where did this idea come from, and in what ways do you see the experience of the audience as a formative part of your work?

FR: This was a first attempt to develop this idea—it’s the typical treasure hunt structure. I’m very interested in the idea of creating site-specific works. With this strategy, you follow the footsteps of the characters: you buy the comic books in the same place where the narrative is taking place. It’s an anomalous way to distribute the comics, as each issue is only distributed in a single place. When I did this project, I was very concerned about creating a special community of fans. Now I’m developing a new version of this project also for CIC in Cairo. It will be a more ambitious version with eight different issues.

You have said that comic is a “democratic medium.” Can you elaborate on this?

FR: I think everybody can learn to make comics and you don’t need any special training. You can even self-publish and distribute them, and the Internet makes this even easier. I’ve seen a lot of different voices depicted through comic books—it’s a very cheap and powerful tool to disseminate your ideas.

What are the issues facing us today that you’re most interested in, concerned about, or motivated by as an artist? What should we be paying attention to?

FR: I keep my eyes wide open. I think the important thing is to keep being curious about everything.