NORMAN RUIZ v rozhovoru s PIER STOCKHOLM
19 žáří 2008 v Café Louvre, Praha
čas:16:40

NR: Happy birthday. 31 years ago, you were born in Lima, Peru.
PS: Indeed. 31! So many people die before then.
And I am here in this beautiful café in Prague celebrating…..

NR: Your name is strange for a Peruvian, isn’t it?
PS: I know! People in South America don’t seem to care much about my name,
but in Europe everybody comments on it.

NR: You studied architecture at university. Why did you then turn to art?
PS: I studied architecture but I never felt like an architect.
Back then, I could not study art for practical reasons.
My family was having trouble, financial and emotion, and they just would not  support me
if I’d wanted to go to art school.

NR: But why study architecture? You could have just tried to be an artist, no?
PS: That’s true, but in Peru, at that time, it didn’t seem like a good idea.
I thought of drpping out of school, but all I did was take six months off and go to Argentina.

NR: To be an artist?
PS: I  had a girlfriend there.  But in Argentina I started attending seminars on contemporary art.
I realized what I wanted to do in life.

NR: Did you finish your course in architecture?
PS: Yes. My architect friends saw me as an artist, and my artist friends saw me as an architect.
It was kind of horrible  not to feel confident enough to define myself.
I needed to classify myself in order to feel safe.

NR: What didn’t you like about architecture?
PS: It’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just not for me. I try to hold on to reality,
and the amount of time architecture demands before you see the final result is too much for me.
I’m too anxious. I can change a lot in a year, it would be terrible for me to see the result 360 days after
I first thought of the project. I love the immediate feel of art.

NR: So you finished architecture school in Lima. Then what?
PS: I went to São Paulo, Brazil, to get a MFA. I was almost 21 years old, and went by bus. I crossed the Andes  from Lima to live in São Paulo without ever having been there before.When I arrived in this city of ten million, it was a shock. But still, I arrived confident, because on the way I stopped in Bolivia, where my mother lives, and met with her spiritual guide. She helped convince me that I was doing the right thing, so I went for it. But during the bus ride I tried to eat vegetarian, and there are a lot of vegetables in the Andes that I’d never heard of! I got sick. And in Bolivia, between La Paz and Santa Cruz, the bus stopped for 16 hours because the coca growers were having a strike. I never tried to be a vegetarian again.

NR: Does that have anything to do with your work?
PS: Um. No.

NR: What did you think about the São Paulo art world?
PS: It’s very fresh. People are doing really interesting things. It’s a unique multimedia scene, art/music/fashion/architecture mix naturally there.

NR: Did the environment there help you?
PS: Lots of artists I met there were working with architecture as reference.
What in Lima felt like a flaw, having studied architecture instead of art,
became a plus, an important part of my work.

NR: So the context changes everything.
PS: It does, until you reach a level of security about what you’re doing.
Then you have your own, private context. At least that’s how it is for me.

NR: How long did you live in São Paulo?
PS:Nearly five years.

NR: What brought you to Europe?
PS: I’d never been. I had a fantasy that everything was better there, like in movies.
I wanted to experience more, and the grass is always greener on the other side. You know?

NR: Now you live in Paris. Why?
PS: I was selected for the postgraduate art program as the Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Paris.
It’s a two year residence program called La Seine. I lived one year at the Cité Internationale des Arts,
then set out on my own in Paris. I’m planning to stay there. The cycle is not closed.

NR: How has Paris changed your work?
PS: My work reflects my life. I’ve had to move so often in Paris
that having objects became a problem. So I’ve been drawing more.

NR: In your drawings, I see a clash between rational/geometrical elements, represented by modern architecture, and irrational/organic images, such strange landscapes and plant life.
PS: I could not have said it better myself. I collect images from architecture and then re-draw them. I like how old architects used drawing, the way they represented and classified nature is amazing. I always use the same mountains that the French Nineteenth century architect Violet-Le–Duc  did when he was traveling through Europe as a student.

NR: So the drawings are the most important part?
PS: I take drawing as a way of finding my axes. The more time I take doing them, the more I go into detail, the more I feel that I am solving my problems. Of course, that feeling is just that. When I looked at my bank account, I see that my problems are still there. The human condition does not change so easily.

NR: About the drawings... You seem to play with different measures of scale, yes?
PS: Yes! My good, it’s like you can read my mind! I’m interested in objects that work in on two scales at once. Take a trophy.  It’s an object used as a symbol of victory, but it’s also a small-scale monument,  a representation of a bigger monument. A tree house is another example, Tree houses are little houses on top of a tree, and they’re also representations of bigger houses, on the ground. Mausoleums are ground-level graves and representations of palaces.

NR: Mausoleums... this is rather dark.
PS: I think that architecture and design have a strong dark and authoritarian side. In Paris I went to the store IKEA for the first time. It doesn’t exist in Peru or Brazil. I was amazed by how many couples go there to fight, the whole smells of divorce. I love to spend the whole day there, with lunch and 200 pencils.

NR: People there seem to think that they would have a better sex life if they buy a certain sofa or bed,
but not another one.
PS: I’ve been making polyester structures that refer to that. They resemble sel- made structures, held to the wall by push pins and elastic bands. It’s amazing how much you can stretch a structure before it collapses. These objects are very phallic, the series is called “I’ll stand sure”.

NR: The scale of those structures seem somewhere between toy and sculpture. Is the mix of vivid white and bright colors meant to be toy-like, or is it a reference to modernist architecture?
PS: Some modern architecture isn’t very practical, and I love architecture when it stands midway between sculpture and building. Le Corbusier’s Mil Owners building in Ahmedabad India is the best sculpture I’ve ever seen.

NR: They say that architects’ egos are bigger than their buildings.
PS: Artists’ egos are even bigger. So many artists just talk too much! Maybe me too, but... I wouldn’t say no to another interview, so long as it’s at IKEA’s restaurant. They have this soda that looks like Sprite but it’s really different!