Ornella Ruiz Díaz

I conceive of painting as an expanded, mutable structure in permanent reconfiguration. My practice starts from colour and organic compositions that build a visual language of their own, where abstraction converses with pop imaginaries and painting overflows the traditional limits of its support.

In recent years my research has turned towards large-scale formats, understanding painting as a spatial, inhabitable experience. Suspended, folded or released from the stretcher, the canvas takes on an installative dimension that transforms the relationship between work, body and environment, producing immersive landscapes of a sensory and oneiric character.

In parallel, I explore the translation of painting into digital environments through phygital formats, blockchain technologies, metaverses, video games and extended reality experiences. I am interested in thinking of the work as an entity able to persist, adapt and take on new functions according to the contexts it passes through.

Performance is a constitutive part of my practice. Through actions that involve the production as much as the transformation or destruction of the work, I investigate permanence and disappearance, materiality and virtuality, control and chance. My work proposes to imagine new ways of inhabiting painting, understood not only as image but as a territory of experience in constant expansion.

Large-format painting that leaves the stretcher and occupies floor, wall and ceiling. The canvas unfolds into space and the body enters it: the work stops being faced and starts being inhabited.

Performance is a constitutive part of the practice. Through actions that involve the production as much as the transformation or destruction of the work, the research addresses permanence and disappearance, materiality and virtuality, control and chance.