Ellena Ruiz - violence of intimacy

The Violence of Intimacy continues my experiments of abstraction investigating the formal, referential, and symbolic aspects of the color pink. Using thin layers of fleshy tones that evoke the inside of the human body, I pair saturation color fields with a history of give and take that suggest musculature or bone fragments. I add paint scraps salvaged from my old paintings, these most textured parts of the paintings I relate to genealogy and generational trauma experienced by queer women of color with immigrant parents. It is informed by queer stories and the refusal of identity politics.

She builds her abstract paintings like bodies and lived experience, layered and scarred to evoke generational trauma and systematic violence but lately they have been shifting from inside the body to the outside of the body and the similarities between body and landscape. They harness watercolor’s association with intimacy to explore discomfort and unease through figurative narratives. Both threads of her work are derived from direct experience, filtered through music and queer writings.