12 NOV – 14 DIC 2025
Artist Francisco Ruiz de Infante presents ‘Countdown (10)’, a solo exhibition curated by Mario Gutiérrez Cru. It is supported by PROYECTOR.
‘Countdown (10)’ is configured as a succession of ten short image-text sequences, a kind of visual oratorio on the idea of the apocalypse, conceived not as a spectacular end of the world, but as an intimate breakdown, as a bloodless transparency of our ways of living.
Francisco Ruiz de Infante‘s work—which combines audiovisual, installation, text, sound and performance—is characterised by spaces that appear to be in ruins, fragmented memories, hybrid languages, a DIY aesthetic and a critical poetics that blends the fragile and the technological.
‘Countdown (10)’ will be a site-specific intervention: ten images and texts that follow one another like temporal detonations, making visible what is no longer the future but what hurts in the present. Perhaps disordered sequences that construct anthropologies of the imminent end: memory as a minefield, dreams as broken mirrors, words as rescue.
Viewers passing through OBLIQUO will be invited to pause and imagine the countdown: what apocalypse means today, what voices remain, what silences weigh heavily. The idea is that each of the ten pieces will be brief, almost fulminating, but that together they will create a persistent atmosphere of waiting, risk and revelation.
OBLIQUO
Calle Valencia 17, Madrid.
Monday to Sunday from 9am to 9pm.
Countdown (10)
Site specific installation
2025
Francisco Ruiz de Infante
Francisco Ruiz de Infante (Vitoria-Gasteiz, 1966) is a multifaceted author living and working between Strasbourg and Auberive (France). Since 1999, he has been coordinator of the research group Art Hors-Format –Time Arts- at the Haute École des Arts du Rhin (Strasbourg).
As an artist, he has exhibited major projects at centres like the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, the Maison de l’Image in Geneva, the Blaffer Gallery, Houston, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, the Kunsthalle in Bonn, the Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico City, Centro de Arte La Panera in Lleida, and the Metronom gallery in Barcelona.
In 2008, he launched a cycle titled “Ecosistemas BlueSky” which has given rise to exhibitions, films and publishing products in diverse contexts: Argentina (Espacio Fundaci.n Telefonica, Buenos Aires), France (Atheneum de Dijon; Galerie Fernand Léger in Ivry-sur-Seine/Grand Paris), Spain (Artium, Alava; Galeria Elba Benitez Madrid; Fundacion Botin, Santander) … Video works produced throughout the cycle include HolyBilis (2013), B.S.o.D. (Training attitude) (2009), and his latest piece, Campos eventuales (2019-20).
From his extensive film catalogue, we can cite the feature-length film The Wolves (1995) and the short film Les choses simples (winner of a Prix Découverte at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma de Montréal, 1993).
He is currently working closely with choreographer Olga Mesa on their joint theatrical, plastic and audiovisual art project “Carmen // Shakespeare” (2013‑21). www.fueradecampo.fr
An artist hors-format, I belong to a generation whose sensibility has been shaped by the encounter and confrontation between audiovisual machines for control and entertainment, and other, apparently simpler or more commonplace materials.
Juggling with the concepts of “high tech” and “emergency DIY,” I seek to reconstruct the workings of memory as it informs the present (with all the misinformation, redundancies and accelerations produced by the unconscious mind).
The notion of multilinear progression predominates in my artistic process. I lay down multiple paths, tunnels, thematic series; proposing journeys of initiation that seek to establish dialogues, at times paradoxical, with the spectator.
References to the passages of childhood/adolescence/adulthood run throughout my projects, conjuring spaces in which the “everyday strange” is brought to the surface through a narrative of Baroque structures.
My work is a giant treasure hunt where each spectator has to find his or her own logic.
The works of this author, disturbing at times, submerge us in an intense physical and mental experience.
https://ruizdeinfante.com/