“… Manuel Ruiz Vida is obsessed with the passing of time and the marks it leaves on things. He likes rust, mildew, stains, decrepit facades, moisture rings on walls, scraps of wallpaper, all that reminds a scaling or a deterioration produced indirectly or directly by human activity. This eventually constitutes a world where his gaze takes shelter, a tender and simply poetic, welcoming, fraternal and human place.
The object as a support and the light as the revealer of time, a light born of superimposed colored layers, scraped, where subtle reflections and violent contrasts mix. Thus illuminated, the utensil or the industrial landscape refutes all nostalgia: there is no regret for what has been, but on the contrary an admiration for what is – or for what becomes – for these objects and landscapes, whom like us, do not finish growing. Like us, they consist of a succession of traces, often invisible, that only light reveals. But we must accept that light is. The research here is of present time. What Manuel Ruiz Vida is concerned with is one of the duties of painting: the redefinition of reality, our reality (whether it is internal or external), grasping it, representing it by sublimating it, transforming it in a true vision of the world; making the apparent everyday banality (a face, an object, a landscape, a feeling) a work of art “.
Olivier Cena. Extracts « Le temps à l’oeuvre » Télérama, january 2005
