Christian Ruiz Berman

Interview by Charlie Tatum

Christian Ruiz Berman’s paintings are filled to the brim. Motifs like architectural divisions, ropes, insects, and birds in lush colors recur across works, creating a visual language that feels at once all-encompassing and mysterious. Ruiz Berman combines abstraction with extremely realistic depictions of plants, animals, and everyday objects to envision worlds that exist by their own logic. Drawing from a wide range of sources, including mythology, philosophy, Buddhism, quantum mechanics, and his own personal experiences, Ruiz Berman’s paintings suggest an interconnectedness among all things, if only we take the time to look. I spoke with Ruiz Berman about how myth-making, storytelling, and history find their way into his practice.

Charlie Tatum (CT): Even though I've had some time to research your practice, tell me briefly about your art. What are you working on now?

Christian Ruiz Berman (CRB): So it's been sort of evolving. I find it difficult to encapsulate into one thing. Because for me, it's really more like a process of discovery.

I had been doing a lot of sculptural work and work that dealt with icons and altars—a synthesis of Mexican iconography, things like feathers and quills and architecture, with painting. And then when I did my MFA, I really wanted to explore just painting on a flat surface and seeing how I could play with illusion and depth and architecture and stories and myths, just on a more simple material level. So I ended up making a lot of very little paintings, which allowed me to get a lot of feedback and put together a small series of works and try to tell stories in an imagistic, but not too grandiose way. It allowed me to cycle through stories.

I was pretty inspired by codices that I saw from Mexico, like the Mendoza Codex and similar ones, which are basically collaborations between indigenous artisans and missionaries and friars who came from Spain. Basically the missionaries wanted to describe the New World and then send these books back to Spain to explain how daily life was in the Aztec world to the Spanish.

It gave me another window into where my family comes from and where I was was raised. Also, it struck a chord with me, being interested in painting as a means of communication and a language in itself—deriving truths or connecting with people in ways that are outside of thought or traditionally how we think of ways to explain things.

Part of that comes from having a biological father who's not very rational. When I tried to reconnect with him, it was very stressful for me in terms of trying to rationalize. So it was easier to read his poems and think of drawing and art-making and talking about that as a way to connect with another being without trying to pin down reality.

So between that and looking at these codices and just in general being interested in art, architecture, memory, and storytelling—that's where these small paintings come from.

CT: What sort of stories are you telling in those paintings?

CRB: Some are personal anecdotes that it would be really hard to pick up on—or someone maybe would apply their own story. Some of them are actual myths from different places, especially Mexican mythology.

For instance, I did one painting called Chained like Chalmol. It's a story of a woman who had a lover, and her father, who was the king of the region, wouldn't let her be with that man. So she had a witch doctor transform her lover into a beetle, and she would wear the beetle on a little chain around everywhere, even though she had to marry somebody else. To this day, if you go to the Yucatan, there are women who wear live beetles that are encrusted in rhinestones on little chains that will walk around on their clothing. I found that sort of transference from myth to reality and blurring the boundaries of those things to be really interesting. And so the painting has one of those beetles in it and this jungle-y face portrait of who the lover might be.

Sueño del contador enamorado, 2018

Acrylic on panels with artist's frame

11 x 13 x 1 in.

CT: In a lot of your work, you're creating a sort of visual vocabulary where certain motifs or symbols come up in different paintings and reappear—such as ropes and strings. Are there any other examples of imagery that you keep coming back to, and where do those images come from?

CRB: So the ropes and strings have been part of a few-year exploration of Buddhism and quantum mechanics. Obviously, I'm not a mathematician, so my understanding is on the very surface level. But I find the connections between those two things fascinating in that both describe reality as really a set of interconnections and happenings versus a set of discrete things or selves. I've been reading the philosophy of people like Karen Barad and Donna Haraway a lot, who are contemporary feminist philosophers who talk about entanglements and tentacles and the web between things.

So I like to think of these paintings also not as independent parts, but as interdependent parts of a conversation or of who I am. Ropes and pearls and things like that are visual ways to say that and to tie them together and make them one narrative. One of the foundations of Buddhism is that there is no self independent from your body and the actions that are happening in your body and everything around you. Instead of having this like concrete "I am Christian"—if you start to break that down, you find that all you really are is a set of processes and happenings which are all right now.

My mind has been like trying to wrap itself around that subject for a while now. It's really changed the way that I look at art-making and why I'm making. Once you start to break down this concept of an imagined self, then you're like, Why? A lot of these reasons that people have—like Oh, I want to be famous or I want to get a lot of praise or prestige—they really start to break down on their own. And you're left with OK, well, I'm doing this because I'm doing it and it's pleasurable. It's just what it is. A lot of the newer paintings are starting to be more like Zen paintings or like philosophical explorations of those ideas.

"So I like to think of these paintings also not as independent parts, but as interdependent parts of a conversation or of who I am."

CT: Architecture is something that also seems to play an important role. Some of the paintings literally have these custom-built architectural frames and other ones have screens and walls and other divisions in the compositions. How are you thinking about space when you're painting?

CRB: I've always been interested in architecture. I have a degree in landscape architecture, so I was naturally just thinking about structure and spaces a lot before I started painting. But there's a fascinating link there too, in that people tend to always want to construct realities that are very defined. Architecture is really interesting to me in that, as time goes on and people's cultures change and people migrate, they build these things which are like a lasting monument or an expression of something. But they also include this entire amalgamation of histories and influences within that building or space. And then we carry these memories of these spaces and feelings of being in those spaces with us. And that in turn, really starts to define or characterize how we think of ourselves. Architecture is there because it's very easy to understand it as an expression of humanity's changing nature and the interplay between creating something solid, seemingly solid, and everything that's in the intention in the action behind that.

Heartache apparatus, 2019

Graphite on paper

8 x 8 in.

CT: You’re talking about this idea of collecting all of these experiences or happenings and how they leave their marks on either a place or a person in the future. In an artist statement you mentioned that your work is rooted in your personal relationship to migration and adaptation. Could you talk about that?

CRB: Sure, I think I think growing up and coming to the United States and being young, I always felt very ungrounded and sort of homeless, not belonging to one place or another. And then as I got older, I started to embrace that and just think of myself as someone who travels around a lot and can be at home everywhere, maybe—or at least enjoys that process—letting go of the idea that you have to be from one place or defined by one thing. Ultimately that can be comforting, but in some ways it's sort of illusory.

There's also no escaping everything that's made you. There are so many parts of Mexico, for example, that in some way make up my basic intellectual and physical biology. And they just keep expressing themselves whenever I make something. So I sort of let go into that flow of events. In past interviews and artist statements, I would often say I'm really trying to figure out what it means to be a Mexican painter in contemporary times. With people like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, we created a cliché of what Mexican painting is—something that I think was hard for Mexicans to get out of. It's taken a longer time for contemporary painting to come back in Mexico versus here, where it seems to be very alive and thriving.

And so I used to say, I'm invested in and figuring out what it means to be a Mexican-American immigrant painter. But lately, I have come to realize that you can't. As soon as you start to try to conceptualize that or define that, you're creating a mythology. Whatever I am, wherever I came from, and whatever influences are there are just going to be there. And that whole history ends up coming into the process, whether I really want it to or not.

There's a lot of concern and obsession with representing something or a group of people or naming something. And I think that's very tied to this incredibly strong concept of self, which if you really deeply analyze, it becomes very empty. There's a there's a philosopher named Jiddu Krishnamurti who I read a lot who says, "When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence."

One of the main tenets of Buddhism, too, is that even in acknowledging this lack of inherent self, one of the most important things is to then be compassionate, and this natural compassion arises out of that when you see that everything is arising as one. And so I think acting compassionately involves doing things like including people who are not already included and recognizing the divisions that humanity has made. But at the same time, especially in the U.S., people forget the flip side of that coin, which is acknowledging the illusion of those divisions, which is where it all started from.

"I used to say, I'm invested in and figuring out what it means to be a Mexican-American immigrant painter. But lately, I have come to realize that you can't. As soon as you start to try to conceptualize that or define that, you're creating a mythology."

CT: I see a parallel in the ways that you're thinking about abstraction—in terms of pushing back against a specific identity and questioning it with literal abstraction. You often play with a combination of abstract and representational components in your paintings and drawings. How do you balance the two of those?

CRB: This is part what I'm saying about how I feel like sometimes we do things without knowing why we're doing them. When I started, it felt like a very natural process to start with a brush stroke or an abstraction or an environment and then improvisationally build these stories into it. And I always enjoyed rendering things realistically just for the pleasure of it. So doing those two processes together was the initial reason for it.

Now, I've come to see or understand that it's become about questioning the boundaries between things and what is abstract and what is real. All the way down to the quantum level where it's like things are a wave and a particle at the same time. All of existence is basically living in this moment of creation. When you look at the nature of everything down to its smallest level that we can talk about, the place you keep getting to is a moment of potential.

I just did a painting that has a spiral and then a little ruby inside a seashell. What that painting is saying is that there is this process that we're in where we keep going round and round and we're living—being in this material part of life, this body that you're in—and then meditation is like focusing down to just the pure state of being, which is the other part of that reality. And so the ruby is based on a poem by Rumi where he talks about being a ruby. And so that ruby is that moment of focus or that moment of clarity or unity of things kind of set against this more abstract swirling around, like time continuing or our perception of things changing all the time.

Laberinto de la soledad, 2018

Acrylic on panels with artist's frame

11 x 13 x 1 in.

CT: Our conversation has been mostly about painting, even though you've worked in sculpture, video, and other media before. Is painting your focus now?

CRB: In the past couple of years, especially, I've really been bouncing back and forth. I just completed an hour-long film that I did collaboratively with my friend Marisa Adesman. That took every ounce of our energy, because we did everything ourselves. We wrote, edited, and shot everything. That took us about a year and a half. It allowed me to do a lot of things that you can't do as a painter and collaborate with people in a really different way—get out and explore in a really different way. And deal with music and poetry at the same time. I've never been narrow in my field of interests. It was really refreshing after being in an MFA and being in a room full of people, talking about a thing on a wall all the time. It gave me a renewed energy to get back to painting and have a more personal practice.

CT: How do you decide what form an artwork will take? Do you usually start with a specific idea? Or start with a material concern and then the idea sort of appears out of that?

CRB: It really varies sometimes. I've been thinking more about politics and poetry and ways to play with words through the titles of the paintings. Those specific paintings haven't materialized yet, because they take a little bit more planning. I also do a lot of paintings that start with a material exploration or brushstrokes or abstraction. That's how I'm used to working, so there's still a lot of that going on.

CT: What do you hope viewers take away from your work?

CRB: Joy and possibility more than anything else. I'm very hesitant to prescribe any kind of narrative or identity or purpose to my paintings. I like painting and making art versus being a politician or something because it has an open potentiality. It allows people to take it where they want and not have to be prescriptive all the time. I do think the place where the paintings come from is a sense of joyfulness and exploration. The reason I've been drawn to thinking about history and politics in my work lately is that there seems to be a lack of compassion in general. And so any sort of purpose I can tease out of life at this point is to be compassionate towards everyone and everything. And hopefully that would somehow happen through painting. I don't know how it does, but I'm trying to trust that's a possibility.

Charlie Tatum

Charlie Tatum is a writer and editor based in New Orleans, Louisiana. He has written essays and conducted interviews for art and culture publications including Pelican Bomb, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Temporary Art Review, and BURNAWAY, and contributed to catalogues published by Prospect New Orleans, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, UB Art Galleries, and the Charlotte Street Foundation, among others.