Francis Ruyter

(born 1968-)

New York-based artist Francis Ruyter's works evoke snapshots of daily life, scenes of American iconography and surreal collaged alternate realities. Ruyter projects photographic slides on large monochrome canvases in their studio, traces the general forms with black permanent marker then fills the positive and negative spaces with solid fields of flat, non-naturalistic acrylic colors. The resulting paintings induce childhood memories of paint-by-numbers but also, intriguingly, call to mind the graphic power and immediacy of Andy Warhol screen prints. However, the immediate visual richness of the works should not negate the conceptual complexity of Ruyter's practice, in which he is exploring the fluidity or rigidity of 'discrete' artistic media, altering the conventional experience of viewing photographs through his manipulation of scale and incorporation of abstraction in his translation of forms.