Shana Nys DambrotIn Christian Ruiz Berman’s singular painting God giving god to god (mapaches), a pair of agile raccoons offer a bouquet of unctuous, shimmering space lilies to an impassive stone statue, as another totemic figure looks on across interdimensional time and space. This atavistic anthropomorphic depiction of paying tribute to the loved, feared and worshiped is set among a topsy-turvy pattern-based world of richly hued green and fuchsia veined agate, and a bit of warm wood grain, amid sprays of delicate flowers and hearty leaves that seem both tropical and medicinal. A many-spiked star motif looks like the universal symbol for symbols.
Christian Ruiz Berman: God giving god to god (mapaches), 2023 (Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim; Yubo Dong/ofstudio photography)
What sounds like an unruly surrealist tumult of bricolaged visual samples, in the hands of a multidextrous painter like Ruiz Berman, such compositions are carefully engineered and even more attentively rendered to bring out a unified field of dream logic across the disparate elements—or at least the poetic sensation of one. In order to pull off these feats, Ruiz Berman must only be a careful choreographer of his chosen lexicons, but also an expert channeler of an array of visual tropes and styles—from photorealism and trompe l’oeil to hard-edge abstraction, loosely gestural pure pigmentation, and illustrationist contemporary attitude.
Christian Ruiz Berman: Two hearts, 2023 (Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim; Yubo Dong/ofstudio photography)
The witty Two hearts sends up a playing card motif as its pair of white parrots (cockatiels, maybe?) are visually linked across two iterations (Audubon and cyborg) by a string of pearls that probably represents wisdom and also perhaps a family thread like DNA. Pink flowers (dogwood? Japanese cherry blossoms?) rough-textured stone hearts and heart-shaped frame insets for the birds hover across a spliced background built like a marquetry of sliced-up abstract patterns; the pearls and branches connect all the planar shards like the board of Chutes & Ladders.
Christian Ruiz Berman: Grackles of grace, 2023 (Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim; Yubo Dong/ofstudio photography)
Besides the raccoons and previous works involving primates, snakes, and other animals, in this series it’s all about the birds. Mockingbirds and ravens recur along with finessed botanicals, mottled stones, and increasingly assertive passages of technicolor geometry, as clearly cited mid-century American abstraction takes up more and more of the language. In Grackles of grace, a delicately ornate porcelain urn that exudes “valuable and significant and very old object” is both interrupted by and exudes the petal-like striations of pure contemporary color that radiate from it.
Christian Ruiz Berman: Hide and seek, 2023 (Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim; Yubo Dong/ofstudio photography)
In both Charmed, I’m sure and Many suns, the abstraction passages are the most prominent, taking up equal space and holding it, not as background bits but as main elements of the story and the optical experience. While the latter enacts the interdimensional and ancestral bridging with pre-Columbian statuary, the former returns to the ancient and futuristic aviary, and introduces a new archetypal symbol—a jeweled hand that is evocative of holiness but elusive as to origin. A dozen accompanying porthole-size tondos—the breezy but chromatically saturated Wave/particle paintings—expand on this slippery specificity as yet another framework for human perception. Per the Heisenberg Principle and the idea that we alter something by the mere act of observation, and how science can’t measure mass, location, and velocity at the same time, it has to do with how perception and cognition really work, and how it’s operatic and messy but still possible to locate meaning within its layers.
Christian Ruiz Berman: Charmed, I’m sure, 2023 (Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim; Yubo Dong/ofstudio photography)
The press release included a piece of verse by Ruiz Berman (he likes to include poetry with his exhibition information, offering his audiences yet another way into the psychic space where the work exists), and it reads in part, “My homeland is a hologram / projected from an onyx eye / and my heart lives on the open palm / of philosophers and pharaohs…” Aside from a linguistic companion to the paintings, these stanzas contain within them the whole heady mix of personal and family history, geopolitical events, ancestral cultures, Western art history, migration and technology. It’s a lot, but since as the title implies there’s no shortcut to the territories of the past or the mind, it’s lucky he likes taking the long way.
“No Shortcuts to Aztlan” is on view at 1700 S. Santa Fe, 4th floor; downtown, through February 17; nicodimgallery.com.
Christian Ruiz Berman: Wave/particle tondo, 2023 (Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim; Yubo Dong/ofstudio photography)
Christian Ruiz Berman: Wave/particle tondo, 2023 (Courtesy of the Artist and Nicodim; Yubo Dong/ofstudio photography)
Christian Ruiz Berman: No shortcuts to Aztlan, Installation view at Nicodim Gallery (Photo: Yubo Dong/ofstudio photography)
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